The Social Distance Between Us
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Brought to you by Penguin.
Britain is in a long-distance relationship with reality...
From poverty and policing, homelessness and overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme that links all these afflictions: proximity. 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. Almost every job requires a level of experience and training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country - our political class.
So this is a book about the distance, whether geographical, economic, or cultural, between those who make decisions and the people on the receiving end of them. The distance between the affluent and the poor, how their interests and values diverge, and the assumptions they make about each other's experiences and intentions in the absence of any meaningful interaction. How even those with the noblest aims, inadvertently cause harm as a result of their social remoteness and fail to advance anybody's interests but their own misguided ones.
Could Britain's problem be, not that there is a lot of inequality, but that for generations, a small group of people, who know little about it, have been charged with discussing, debating, and sorting it out? At what point do we look for answers, not to the people who are hardest up, but the apparently educated and sophisticated, whose dominance of Britain's institutions has been virtually unbroken for centuries?
Praise for Darren McGarvey:
'The standout, authentic voice of a generation' Herald
'Utterly compelling' Ian Rankin, New Statesman
'Brilliant' Russell Brand
'An absolutely fascinating individual' Owen Jones
'Offer[s] an antidote to populist anger that transcends left and right... articulate and emotional' Financial Times
'McGarvey is a rarity: a working-class writer who has fought to make the middle-class world hear what he has to say' Nick Cohen, Guardian
© Darren McGarvey 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
He’d scoff at the description but Darren McGarvey is a renaissance man. Also known by his hip-hop handle Loki, he’s a rapper and writer, a documentary maker and community worker, an activist and commentator. Subtitled “How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain”, his second book—follow-up to the Orwell Prize-winning Poverty Safari—finds McGarvey investigating the growing gaps in 21st-century society. Not only are the powerful ever more divorced from ordinary people but we’re disconnected from each other too. This isn’t some polemic tapped out in an ivory tower. As a recovering alcoholic who grew up in a tough part of Glasgow with a drug-addicted mother, McGarvey has first-hand experience of what he describes. He writes from the frontline, venturing into pubs and prisons, food banks and call centres, to deliver vividly raw reportage. It’s impressively up to date, weaving the Covid pandemic, culture wars and Westminster scandals into its analysis. He suggests solutions to the problems he outlines. He swears with frustration at times. At others, he despairs. Yet he’s never less than erudite and entertaining.