The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain

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Possibly an uncomfortable read for the mandarins in British politics, but that's exactly the reason this book should be taken seriously.

It is in his castigation of middle-class people that McGarvey is most challenging. His dismissal of their woolly liberalism, and their distance from the grinding reality of poverty, is full of sweeping generalisations. But maybe that’s the point. Working-class people face sweeping generalisations all the time. Maybe he is holding a mirror up to middle-class prejudices, and we just don’t like our own reflection. The poet Jo Clement gives voice to the stories and people of her family’s Romany past. In her collection Outlandish she has no time for Romantic impressions of British Gypsy ethnicity as she moves from ancient stopping-places to decaying council estates. Her poems are imaginative protests that cast light on a hidden and threatened culture. At the end of the book, he makes a number of quite radical recommendations as to how we could close the distance between us. I learnt a lot from many of the stories that he told throughout the book,This is McGarvey at his best, asking discomfiting questions of many – most? – of his readers and also pointing out that class inequality is endlessly reproduced by people who either do well out of it or are too institutionalised to see what is in front of them. “If you’re a teacher,” he says, “you could stand up to your colleagues who believe placing children who misbehave in social isolation as punishment represents anything but child cruelty… If you’re a copper, you could grass up some of your colleagues now and then instead of turning a blind eye… If you run a business, you could commit to paying your staff a little more than the living wage and if that is unaffordable, you might question why the business model you have adopted only works when you pay poverty wages.” His analysis of existing political positions and parties is equally insightful; I found his analysis and critique of the left (with whom I share many of his sympathies and frustrations) particularly so. Join Darren McGarvey on a journey through a divided Britain in search of answers. Here, our latter-day Orwell exposes the true scale of Britain's social ills and reveals why our current political class, those tasked with bringing solutions, are so distanced from our lived experience that they are the last people you'd want fighting your corner. The RRP is the suggested or Recommended Retail Price of a product, set by the publisher or manufacturer. Why are the rich getting richer while the poor only get poorer? How is it possible that in a wealthy, civilised democracy cruelty and inequality are perpetuated by our own public services? And how come, if all the best people are in all the top jobs, Britain is such an unmitigated bin fire?

Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey is a legend. I love his opinion’s in this book that I’ve read so far, and from having him as a Facebook friend I see his opinions on different subjects daily so I really am enjoying this book. I am middle-class. I was sent against my will to a government-funded, fee-paying school which I hated. I was dragged reluctantly along the conveyor belt to a minor university. I dropped out. I started to hate the middle class and everything it stood for. So I left it. I became a class-refugee, 'déclassé' as we snooty class-refugees would term it. This was the mid-sixties. I got a job as a gardener at a Stately Home. I was fired because my bean-rows weren't straight. I 'signed on the dole'. I never worked again. Now, thanks to the EU I get an Old Person's dole (900 euros a month) from the French state. But I was able to be downwardly mobile precisely because of my education. Although I hated school, I loved learning, and was good at English, French, Biology and German. This meant that I could sustain myself morally and intellectually. He analyses the failures of both Tory and Labour governments and of both the Blairite right wing in the Labour party and the Corbynite left wing. this move to digitisation reveals perhaps the greatest absurdity of austerity Britain - you cannot own a phone if you’re poor but you can’t access benefits without the internet."found there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than those in the most affluent areas."

A troubling tale of disaffection between classes in Britain – it's resolute in its class-based analysis, despite how out of fashion that is, and after reading this book it's difficult to disagree. That makes it an uncomfortable read for any middle-class person, since it's the middle class who takes the brunt of Garvey's assignment of blame. By allowing the working class to be demonised, and by allowing the creation of a benefits and support environment at least as "hostile" as that facing immigrants, the stage has been set for a breach between people that allows everyone to be manipulated by those in power. For me so called immigration anxieties are projections and pretexts that would take some other form if it were not for immigration. As the author put it in plain speak 'a political red herring '. And yet. As with Poverty Safari, the book that won him one of 2018’s Orwell prizes, the quality of McGarvey’s reporting and storytelling is first-rate. And with the direct encounters and personal experiences underpinning his arguments, he makes no end of astute points. A big problem with 21st-century attitudes to childhood, he says, is that “belts have just been replaced with time-outs, naughty steps and shame culture”. There is a wealth of material about the “over-policing” of deprived people and places and its overlooked consequences for the ways that lots of people – young men, mostly – understand power and their relation to it. McGarvey also asks potent questions about the links between our school systems and a low-end labour market millions of us are only too happy to take advantage of, with barely a thought for the iniquities it perpetuates: “If young people from poorer communities didn’t drop out of school early or fail to achieve high enough grades to go straight to university,” he asks, “then who would do those low-paid, precarious jobs? Who would be there to answer your call about your car insurance at 11pm? Who would be working the drive-throughs when late-night hunger strikes?”Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’

Join Orwell prize-winning author, BAFTA nominated broadcaster and celebrated hip-hop artist Darren McGarvey for his new show centred on his recent book, The Social Distance Between Us. In it Darren confronts the scandal of class inequality with passion, humility and a dose of humour. All this autobiography is trotted out because I (rather like George Orwell, I suppose) grew up with middle-class attitudes and had to shed them one by one. I had that choice. I have had "the poor" (alcoholic, hopeless, queer) in my house, and I have seen how humiliated they are - and how frightened of every agency of the state. Northern Ireland had a Dole and Remittance Economy (with almost 25% unemployment weighted against Catholics), and I bore no stigma for being designated Unemployable - probably because I was "well-spoken"!There are stories of people leaving rehab early because they’ll lose their home - the state won’t pay rent and rehab. People having their benefits stopped because they’re late to an appointment with no discretion - one man was trying to help his suicidal sister…