State of the Nation

 

The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain

Darren McGarvey

(Penguin)

 

It would be possible to fill the library of a small university with books outlining the problems besetting twenty-first century Britain. Most are written by journalists, academics, or politicians, all of whom occupy a space that is at one remove from issues at hand.

Darren McGarvey provides a diagnosis of our multiple ills from the yawning inequality gap and the trauma induced by contact with the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the welfare state, to political disengagement and social isolation that is as cogent as it is shocking. The difference between his book and that of other would-be social commentators is that he does so from a basis of proximity, painful lived experience of being outside the charmed circle of middle-class life.

Proximity and its importance to understanding where we are and how we got there is central to the argument he makes. It is something the ‘political class’, ‘metropolitan liberals’, the ‘establishment’, or any other catch all definition lack. They inhabit a world of privilege and comfort that makes it near impossible for them to imagine let alone empathize with the challenges facing many working people.

He lays out just how overwhelming those challenges are in forensic detail, detailing amongst other things the hoops benefits claimants are forced to jump through and the prejudices inherent within the education system. In doing so he raises the critical and often malign influence of something that other commentators fight shy of mentioning in the drawing room of current political discourse, class.

Behind the problems we face now and the bigger ones waiting just around the bend is a concerted and decades long assault on the working class by those at the top of the pile. It has infected every corner of national life from the high table of politics through a corrupt and debased media to the legions of petty bureaucrats bustling around our town halls.

This is not though an internet rant extended to book length, McGarvey, rightly savages the Tories for inflicting harmful austerity policies on the most vulnerable people whilst feathering the nests of bankers and corporate raiders. He also turns his fire on the Left, both the mainstream version represented by the Labour Party, which after winning a landslide majority under Blair in 1997 squandered the chance to bring about real change, and the radical Left for preferring arcane internal disputes and intellectual posturing to doing anything genuinely revolutionary.

Refreshingly McGarvey does all this not from the lofty heights of personal certainty, he writes with painful awareness about the compromises and not infrequent faux pas he has made as someone from ‘humble origins’ trying to make his way in a social landscape dominated by middle class sensibilities. If only other pundits were willing to show as much vulnerability and humility our public discourse would be a lot less fraught.

McGarvey has been likened to George Orwell and it is a comparison I am sure he is flattered by; however, he would likely point out one massively important difference. Orwell was educated at a public school, for all his compassion for the suffering of working people his voice, both spoken and on the page is the RP one of an insider, so despite his best efforts was his mindset.

Darren McGarvey represents something else entirely, something that is shamingly almost unique in the babble of political commentary, the authentic voice of the person on the street. Sometimes bluntly to the point of being rude, often hauntingly eloquent, and always painfully honest. That is what makes what he has to say worth listening to.

Good Reads, Thursday 18^th January 2024