by Duncan MacLaren

Darren McGarvey is a rapper from the Pollok housing scheme in Glasgow, a self-confessed alcoholic and former drug user, and has been called an ‘Orwell for today’s poor’. In The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain, published by Penguin: Random House in 2022, he uses material from his background to give an account of the social state of Britain.

McGarvey’s first book, Poverty Safari, is one of the finest analyses I have read of poverty in Scotland. It won him, appropriately enough, the Orwell Prize in 2018 as the book, in Orwell’s words, ‘make[s] political writing into an art.’ In the acknowledgements of his latest work, he hopes it will not be ‘as difficult to read as it was to write’. He has become a very good and engaging writer whose justifiable anger at the state of communities in his home patch is palpable.

This book tackles not only the incompetence of the British state, which adds to the travails of already marginalised people, but what McGarvey posits as the ‘one unifying theme which connects many of Britain’s current difficulties - proximity’. By ‘proximity’ he means ‘how close we are to the action and how that affects the ways in which we assess, relate and respond to it’. His book is redolent with stories of how those who rule and come from a different background fail to understand the underclass they have created. He illustrates magnificently how the political authors of austerity mostly produced food poverty, homelessness, drug deaths and suicides. In other words, the poorest bore the brunt of austerity but it was the rich elites who caused it.

Dr Duncan MacLaren has been a volunteer in programmes dealing with homeless people, drug users, refugees and asylum seekers. His PhD thesis from the University of Glasgow was on Integral Human Development which he taught at the Australian Catholic University for six years after working for SCIAF and Caritas Internationalis.