The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain

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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. It all boils down to education. I moved to France because of Brexit, being ineluctably middle-class, and the blessed Irish Nationality which, being a middle-class protestant, I had to claim. (When Thatcher sold off council houses I tore up my imperialist British passport.) I was ashamed to be British and to be white, as well as ashamed of my class. France has a terrible education system based on rote - but not based on class. Class is a much more simple and honest thing in France : it's the small élite versus the rest, just as it was before the Revolution. 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." This was an angrily written book in the best way possible. Many books about social inequality and poverty appear to have a sort of detached viewpoint and write it as a matter of fact - Darren McGarvey is seething and bitter in his exposure of the systemic issues of a multitude of facets like health, housing, and class.

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?” 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.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.

Some years ago, I was dragged along to Barnsley Civic Centre to a concert by the Pitmen Poets. I have a general rule that I don’t like any poetry that I haven’t written, and the fact that this concert was going to be two-plus hours of traditional folk songs interspersed with other peoples’ poetry left me cold. Much to my surprise, Bob Fox and his band were amazingly good, and I was soon swept along with the moment. 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.Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ He describes how inequalities in education, housing, jobs - in fact just about everything - make it extremely difficult for those born into poverty to escape. Because the majority of people in local and national government, the criminal justice system, social services, and all the others who make decisions about the lives of poor people haven't experienced the same problems, their "solutions" often only make things worse. He also examines different political positions - literally left, right and centre - and how they have all failed the poorest and most vulnerable. He is fair in his assessment of how some actions have been well meaning but have not achieved their aims, while others may have been based on inflexible and outdated beliefs. Since leaving the corporate world, I realise that putting shareholder value above all else will destroy the future of our children. 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.’

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.These days I live in a little terrace miles away from the nearest town. I work from home, and the work I do is business-to-business writing. The closest I get to experiencing working class people now is when I stop and chat to the cleaners on my monthly visit to head office. I’ve got to be honest, I like it that way. I’m one of the few people who, in the words of McGarvey, is ‘ grateful for the exacting dimensions of the sand box you’ve been allowed to play in’. I still think of myself as working class, but I’ve got to be honest, I’m much more of a reed diffuser kind of guy these days. Possibly an uncomfortable read for the mandarins in British politics, but that's exactly the reason this book should be taken seriously.

If this book doesn’t make you angry, you need to have a good look at yourself. I was seething, crying, astonished, flabbergasted… Mr McGarvey tells the story of Britain and inequality by slapping you round the face with research, statistics, anecdotes, and personal stories. But this is not a polemic. He doesn’t ‘hate’ rich people and they do feature in the book. He just shows us very clearly why we are in our current mess. And why if you have a system that can profit from misery, then the system won’t really want it to stop. Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ 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 book is at its best as a piece of reportage; powerful stories of individuals told with empathy.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 '.