Darren McGarvey (2022) The Social Distance Between Us. How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain.

Darren McGarvey (2022) The Social Distance Between Us. How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain.

I met Darren McGarvey a few years ago in Dalmuir Library. I’d passed him on the way in. He was having a fag outside. The library still exists, but in shortened form as part of the C.E.Centre as part of local-authority cutbacks. I bought the book he was selling, Poverty Safari. Out of sight, out of mind. I can’t remember much about it, even though it won the Orwell Prize. But I did remember his presentation, which wowed me. And I told him so. No notes. No stuttering, ums or ahs. He spoke for almost three-quarters of an hour. Since then he has been the go-to man for the upper and middle-classes to explain ourselves to ourselves and for them to pat themselves on the back and point to equality.  

Although McGarvey did later admit, he overheard one of those middle-class conversations in which subtitles might need to be added to aid the non-native. Those that were shocked that such people existed and were even on television. Not nationally, of course. Somewhere up there.

The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale (1936) shows around 200 men, known as the ‘Jarrow Crusaders’. They marched from Jarrow (Tyne and Wear) to London, covering over 280 miles.  A protest against mass unemployment and enforced poverty in Jarrow after the closure of Palmer’s shipyard in 1934, which had widespread support in similar working-class communites. The plan was to present their mass petition to the Prime Minister at Number Ten. He wasn’t in. And to have those issues raised by their Crusade to be debated in the House of Commons. It didn’t happen.

I think we can guess by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale’s name, he wasn’t working class. But like George Orwell (Eric Blair) he was sympathetic. Foreground in his painting is an upper-class couple lounging around smoking and the male not bothering to look out the window at the marchers with their banners marching below.

Class can mean many things. I prefer the Marxist notion of class exploitation, which explains better than most theories how things work. It’s the exploited workers that create and make value not those that own the means of production. Of course this was easier to understand and apply when the working class were largely manual workers digging coal, for example, or building ships such as those on the Clyde my dad worked on. Less easy to digest when the sons and daughters of those workers labour in call centres or work as delivery drivers in the services industries.

Our problem, of course, is we’ve always had the wrong kind of children. Working-class children. Which was useful enough fighting wars. Where ideas like ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ gets banded about quickly to be forgotten because of notional costs. Like maids of all works. Serving girls that knew their place in an Upstairs Downstairs kind of universe. But the working class insisted on having working class children, whereas if they had middle-class or upper-class children, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today.

None of this is in McGarvey’s book. Just a general rant. Don’t get me started on how we lost the propaganda war—although McGarvey does touch on that. We do share abhorrence for the plague of the manufactured Little Britain world. And, in particular, an abhorrence of media personalities such as Jeremy Kyle. The frontman for poverty porn, dookers, hangers and haranguers. Whose programmes and sneering voice I could not and cannot bear to be in the same room as. Worse still the emergence of the moron’s moron, Trump.

‘If all the best people are in all the top jobs, then why is Britain such a bin fire?’ McGarvey asks (and answers).

Every metric he touches on, wealth, health, educational opportunities and jobs for the boys (and some girls) points towards a conservative world in which those that owned the land owned the people on the land. Profit continually goes to those that profit most and need it least. Those that argue they deserve it rarely need to justify themselves. It’s taken as a given. Take, for example, a representative of the Green Party having to exist they had no plans to tax the super-rich. (Why not?)

As Dugdale’s painting embodies.  Continued post-war class distances closed a little with post-war affluence taxing the rich and building houses and schools alongside the NHS.

But doubled down with the eighties Thatcherite monetarism, ‘let the poppies grow tall’ speech, and the Reagan era of privatisation, tax giveaways and the convenient lie of a rising tide raising all ships.

In recent years Scotland had become a Tory free nation, with no Tories at Westminster (unfortunately they’ve bounced back some in the costume of the Little Britainer, Nigel Farage) but Scotland remained wedded to English ruling elites, while we’ve plenty up here to get on with alone.

   The paradox here, which McGarvey attempts to bridge, his subjects are closer to his former Pollock home. Poverty and its relationship with class. He admits to being in the top 10% of earners making over £80 000 a year (and the top 1% of writers) is he’s shown that meritocracy doesn’t exist here, but it may exist in places like Finland. Seven times consecutive winner on the happiness scale of the best place to live.

‘The idea that poverty is a lifestyle choice is a convenient fiction for those who benefit from the status quo,’ he tells us and sells us.

What ‘Social Distance’ translates into:

The phrase ‘social distance’ jargon.  ‘Those who wield the most power are often the least exposed to its consequences.’

Postcode poverty. Housing, eg Grenfell. Welfare cut without needed to queue at a food bank. Overcrowded classrooms in rundown schools and hospitals.

The poverty-trap is not a choice or personal failure.

 ‘When you are poor, you don’t make bad choices because you’re stupid. You make bad choices because you don’t have good options.’

I don’t need telling. I’m a believer. In many ways, I think he’s preaching to the converted who know we’re being gaslighted. Those unbelievers don’t need to look out of their drawing-room window to us below.  We’ve been framed for the crime of being poor.

Notes.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6