Darren McGarvey’s The Social Distance Between Us is a wake-up call for Britain. It isn’t always an easy or comfortable read and there are some flaws, but overall it is an eloquent, forceful and much-needed exposé of what McGarvey calls ‘the fundamental scandal of British society’ – the fact that we have become such an unequal society and that too few people seem to know or care about it.
The book may shock anyone who believes that class no longer exists in Britain or that the country has become a meritocracy. Based on first-hand encounters and personal experiences, some of them originating in Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars, the BBC Scotland programme that the author presented last year, McGarvey’s book painstakingly details how the social chasms and structural barriers that prevent working class people from climbing into a more comfortable middle-class existence are perhaps more insurmountable than ever.
The problem, in McGarvey’s view, is that Britain’s political class is out of touch with the everyday lives of working-class and deprived people. Hardly any MPs have direct experience of grinding poverty and most lack any ‘proximity’ to the problems Britain’s underclass faces. As a result, their chances of empathising or introducing policies which might address the problems are slim. Even when they try, the policies can be counterproductive. Basic errors are made, such as transferring the country’s welfare system online, even though many welfare recipients don’t have internet access or mobile phones. Where education is concerned, McGarvey says, ‘inequality is written into the … system’s DNA’, adding that private schools are a catastrophe for social equality.
Key journalists seem out of touch too. McGarvey has a go at Robert Peston over a 2019 Spectator article in which the ITV political editor argued that, in offering free broadband and some redistribution of wealth, Jeremy Corbyn was declaring ‘class war’. For McGarvey, this was an absurd claim for Peston to make, given that successive Conservative governments had pursued a class war in the shape of ‘a decade of austerity (which left tens of thousands destitute, homeless, hungry or dead)’.
McGarvey takes us on a tour of deprived communities, such as that of Possilpark in Glasgow, which has ‘suffered a deep spiritual injury’ as a result of deindustrialisation and where male and female life expectancy is now down to sixty-six and seventy-three years respectively. He legitimately asks why such places have inferior healthcare systems to the likes of Bearsden, six miles from the city centre, despite demonstrably greater needs. When he shadows a number of individuals working in deprived communities, such as Graham, who works with homeless alcoholics in Aberdeen, he opens a window on aspects of British society that we in the middle classes rarely, if ever, see.
If you want to find out more about the pernicious side effects of the Universal Credit system, introduced by the UK government in 2012, The Social Distance Between Us is a good place to start. According to McGarvey, it has given Department for Work and Pensions officials licence to deliberately humiliate those they are supposed to be helping: ‘For people facing mental health challenges … simply encountering the Welfare State, whether it’s actively enforcing compliance or clumsily failing to detect complex personal circumstances, is hellish. But for people struggling with those challenges while also living with disabilities, it is life-threatening.’ McGarvey adds that council staff who administer local housing benefits can be ‘faceless desk-killers’, capable of completely destroying someone’s life at the stroke of a pen without any risk of being held accountable.
He points to the profound unfairness of the UK’s current economic settlement, in which working-class wages have flatlined and work is more precarious, employers are more exploitative and trade unions more marginalised than at any time in recent history. Despite successes like the creation of the minimum wage, the Labour Party, he says, lost its way under Tony Blair, patronising instead of helping the working classes. He believes that the fact that the coronavirus pandemic was almost immediately given the status of a public health emergency, leading Rishi Sunak to swiftly hand salaried middle-class people massive state handouts, speaks volumes, especially since ‘drugs deaths, rough sleeping, child poverty and femicide, epidemics spanning decades, still do not qualify for this special designation’.
In his conclusion, McGarvey, whose first book, Poverty Safari, won the Orwell Prize in 2018, provides a short list of recommendations. Measures that he believes would help level the playing field and reduce inequality include abolishing private schools (or at least stripping them of their charitable status), strengthening trade unions, giving workers a seat on corporate boards and introducing a wealth tax to fund free higher education. He also wants a radical shake-up of British democracy, including the abolition of the House of Lords and the elimination of the first-past-the-post voting system.
These are all good recommendations, but I felt some of McGarvey’s proposals could have been further developed. In his opening chapter he says “it is clear the vulgar wealth hoarding (and the political imbalance it creates) not only defines the current economic period but is a key aggravating factor in social inequality generally” but he doesn’t include any detailed proposals for how this might be addressed (other than with a “wealth tax”). He might, for example, have looked at closing down tax havens, tax loopholes, and the scourge of anonymous shell companies.
I also thought the book could have done with a few more moments of light relief, and that McGarvey might have considered how dreadful life was for working-class people in the 19th century. But overall The Social Distance Between is a hugely impressive work that deserves to be as influential as Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 Poverty: A Study of Town Life, a book which prompted Winston Churchill to say, ‘For my own part, I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.’
This book review was published in Literary Review in August 2022