The city, he muses, may well be Scotland’s most beautiful metropolis, where “beams reflect off the granite, rendering even the most ordinary building prestigious and majestic”. But social distance has been at the heart of our biggest challenges since long before Covid-19 struck: in particular, the distance that those in power often keep from the issues they are in charge of solving. YES: Darren McGarvey delivers a searing indictment of the UK system that everyone needs to read, regardless of their individual place and circumstances.

Proximity is how close we are to the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever that action happens to be.I was promoted to the point that all I was used for was sorting out conflict and complaint for every contract across the region. The distance – be it geographical, economic, or cultural – between those who make decisions and those on the receiving end of them has never been clearer, and the parameters of the discussion about social inequality are set by those who have little experience of it. Having now had over 20 years of direct Scottish control over virtually every issue that the author raises, his silence on any aspect of Scottish administration speaks more loudly than any of the other words in the book. It has taken a lot of reading hours to get through this book, but it is never dry, always compelling. As a left wing, card-carrying member of the Labour Party, this was the first time I’d ever stopped to appreciate the difference between what the party was founded to represent and protect, and the pathetic middle class identity politics we have now.

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. From people having to choose between having a home or drug treatment, to the cruelty of Jeremy Kyle to the detached politics of the hard left this book packs it in. His affinity with those on the breadline never wavers; his anger at the indignities inflicted on them never flags.As a result, their chances of empathising or introducing policies which might address the problems are slim. McGarvey has a go at Robert Peston over a 2019 Spectator article in which the ITV political editor argued that, in offering free broadband and some redistribution of wealth, Jeremy Corbyn was declaring ‘class war’. Examining class inequalities in areas such as education, housing, labour and more, the author also examines the increasingly polarised political stances that are leading to an ever more divided world. He drills down to the heart of these problems and ties them in to how they are perceived by the middle and upper classes. This distance multiplies over time, as those who pass laws and oversee programmes to support the most vulnerable often live the kinds of lives that rarely interact with those who they are aiming to support.

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? However, to see it all written down in all it’s glaring unfairness can at times make for difficult reading. We get pages on how young men need bikes to have a place to express their energy as they don't have a community any more, but he seems to skim over the epidemic of women's inequality and the huge contribution it makes to systemic poverty. 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. The problem was that the tenants regarded every single person knocking on their door as “the council”, and thus part of the nameless authority that they despised.He is blistering, too, on the way furlough payments laid bare the contempt at the heart of the benefits system. When a revolutionary socialist government introduced the Welfare State in the late 1940s it preferred to offer generous hand-outs to the poor rather than uproot the class system which made them poor. McGarvey shows how the pandemic exposed the faultline between the haves and have-nots; how people with gardens stood in judgement over those venturing out to public parks.

I found it a complex book to read, there were many sentences and paragraphs I had to re-read to make things sink in, but the huge disparity in quality of life between those at the top who control the economy, who make the laws and are responsible for providing what few public services we have left and those on the receiving end of it is a complex matter, worthy of long and indepth explanation.

In truth, I was really there for two functions – first as a conflict resolver and secondly as an interpreter. He takes a few liberties along the way - not really acknowledging economic forces (like technological change) that are driving a lot of these changes, or not acknowledging agency on the part of some of the people who are painted as helpless victims of society when their problems are entirely self-generated. 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.