Darren McGarvey - Poverty Safari

This book is about poverty and class relations in Scotland. In the interests of full disclosure, I live in Scotland and would classify myself as a bona fide middle class person. I went to private school, have a university degree and worked in a high status job. That’s if status can be defined by salary, which, rightly or wrongly, it often seems to be. So anyone reading this can take my opinions in the context of that cultural background. I don’t think this defines everything I say but it would be foolish to think it has no effect. As McGarvey writes, ‘From a very young age, we are all inculcated into the mores of a tribe and adopt those values often without thought, later mistaking them for our own.’ This seems like fair comment.


I had a mixed reaction to this book. It has interesting and powerfully expressed sections. Other sections are contradictory, incoherent or lack supporting evidence, which weakens the argument being made. It’s a bit disorganised and I wasn’t that keen on McGarvey’s style of writing.


From the outset, McGarvey admits the book doesn’t have a definite structure or argument. This is true and, for me, it affects the quality of the reading experience. The chapters take the form of short anecdotes, experiences or rants. It’s haphazard and I was often left wanting more discussion of the points it raised. I felt like the book highlighted problems more than it offered ideas for solutions. For example, I never felt like I had a good idea of what McGarvey thought about universal basic income’s efficacy as a means of solving poverty because it’s only referred to in passing. With the exception of some broad ideas like taking more personal responsibility, quoted above, engaging in cross-societal discussion and involving people more in their community it was short on specifics. Obviously, a book can’t do everything in a few hundred pages but I didn’t feel like it was very coherent in this regard. In terms of style, McGarvey writes some great passages and has a large vocabulary for someone who claims not to read much. I’m fairly sure this lack of reading has been exaggerated for dramatic effect as he references quite a few books and essays in the course of the book. In some sections the style feels needlessly wordy and verbose. Three or four adjectives or verbs are piled one on top of another where one would do just as well and give the text more clarity. As Orwell wrote in Why I Write, ‘good prose is like a windowpane’ because the writer struggles to efface their personality. McGarvey’s prose is quite the opposite of this and, for me, focuses too much on expressing his personality and too little on the underlying ideas. This book won the Orwell prize, according to google awarded ‘for political writing of outstanding quality’, and while this book is certainly political I don’t think the writing is of outstanding quality.


Some of the book takes the form of heartbreaking memoir. McGarvey writes that, for a while, telling his shocking stories about his Mum and his experiences growing up to middle class people were his specialist subject. He writes, ‘there’s no way someone like me would have been given the opportunity to write a book like this had I not draped it, at least partially, in the veil of a misery memoir.’ I’m not sure how true this is and I’m not well placed to say. I think it is effective insofar as it helps people with no experience of this kind of life gain some understanding of its challenges and hardships. These are things middle class people like me could never imagine as a child. Against this, the narrative McGarvey presents feels heavily redacted and there were points where I really wanted to know more about the other influences in his life. His father seems an interesting figure but is barely discussed in detail. He seems more responsible than McGarvey’s mum: he works, but we don’t find out as what, he encourages them to live a moderate lifestyle and takes them swimming once a week. He wanted to leave McGarvey’s Mum but found out she was pregnant and stayed with her. Did he then go on to have four more children with her or are the siblings McGarvey writes about half brothers and sisters? What was the history behind such a dysfunctional and ill women having so many children? When McGarvey says his relationship with his Dad broke down, why did this happen? Much like the criticism I made of the books structure, there were lots of parts where I wanted to know more. His aunt, who’s an MSP, is another example of this. She sounds like a formidable woman and I wondered what her experience of poverty had been and how she fits in to the narrative of communities isolated from the political process. Again, it’s not fair to ask a book to be several different things at once but I felt like I would have preferred a fuller account of the author’s life and a fuller account of his political ideas. I feel this would have helped provide a clearer presentation of both.


This book had an interesting, if unclear, approach to money. No one in Scotland is in poverty in an absolute sense, as defined by any widely accepted measure. What’s being talked about in this book is relative poverty, having less money or a lower income than most people in your country, which is in no way to say that it's a less serious issue. According to the Scottish government, poverty means less than £7,300 per year, after housing costs, for a single person. To me, that’s an almost inconceivably small amount of money whichever way you look at it. But would the problems of poverty disappear if everyone had more money? Theoretically, if everyone in Scotland's income doubled overnight this would have no effect on relative poverty. I’ve always assumed that giving people more money would have to be a major part of any solution to poverty. I’ve liked and been interested in the idea of Universal Basic Income for a while. This book made me less optimistic about it. I’m not even sure there could be such a thing as a solution to poverty now. The biggest problems that McGarvey writes about don’t seem to be directly related to money. Most seem to be about mental health and, speaking from my own experience as a relatively rich person, money doesn’t seem to be able to solve these problems across the board. Of course, incidence of mental health problems is far lower amongst higher income groups. This is probably in part due to lack of services and resources for lower income groups, which could be improved by more money. But, as McGarvey’s stories about his childhood make abundantly clear, it’s also because people with low incomes experience many more causes of mental health problems and I’m not sure more money would help this. What’s the main cause of these mental health issues? Childhood trauma, according to McGarvey, and this seems to impossible to reverse retrospectively. I may be completely wrong but the environment McGarvey grew up in, as he describes it, doesn’t seem like it would have been helped much by simply giving him and his mother more money. Addicts usually spend any extra money they get on their intoxicant of choice and giving them more cash won’t make the root of their addiction go away. McGarvey describes how he was given a £5,000 backdated disability allowance payment. He writes about how he spent it mainly on drinking and drug taking. I’m not trying to blame him for this, I’d have done the same at his age and I grew up with plenty of positive role models in far less traumatic circumstances. Meanwhile, McGarvey’s mother, who also suffered from addiction, seems a dreadful role model and the cause of considerable trauma for him. Giving large sums of money to young people with no idea how to manage it strikes me as a terrible idea whatever their circumstance. At one point in the book, it seemed like maybe McGarvey did think universal basic income would be the answer when he writes about the options available to people who are living in poverty right now. He asks, rhetorically, what ‘the people who’ll never see Universal Basic Income being rolled out?’ can do. This seems to imply that he feels that UBI could be a solution to poverty but it’s not clear. He doesn’t expand on this point and so it’s inconclusive.


I’m fairly convinced that spending more money on social services must be an important part of reducing poverty but I’m also convinced it can’t be the only part. The overall tone book offers a far more nuanced view of poverty so perhaps his comment on universal basic income was just a rhetorical throw away. I feel like he’s closer to the truth when he writes, ‘contrary to what we’ve been told, the issue of poverty is far too complex to blame solely on ‘Tories’ or ‘elites’. It’s precisely because of the complexity at play, and how difficult it is to grasp, that we look for easy scapegoats. Whether it be the left blaming the rich or the right blaming the poor, we tend only to be interested in whichever half of the story absolves us of responsibility for the problem. That’s not the sort of thing a politician looking to get elected can say to a potential voter.’ I think there’s a lot of truth in this passage. It’s not just a matter of money. It’s not a matter of any one, specific, easily identifiable factor. The worrying and saddening truth about poverty seems to be that no one really knows what to do. Would it have helped McGarvey if his Mum had had more money? Possibly, but the mental health and addiction issues would have surely remained. Would he have been better off if he’d been taken away from his mother at a young age and put in care? Probably not, but what do I know. These sort of counterfactual, theoritical questions don’t seem to be of much use to those experiencing poverty first hand.


I felt like one of the strongest and most powerful parts of the book was McGarvey’s call to take action and responsibility at a personal level. He writes, ‘What we now need to ask ourselves, as a matter of urgency is, which aspects of poverty can we positively affect through our own thinking and action? If poverty is negatively affecting our quality of life, is there any action we could take to mitigate this harm? Ultimately, which aspects of poverty are beyond our control and which are within our capability to change? On the left, I see constant talk of new economic systems, of overthrowing elites or of increasing public spending. I see endless debate about the overlapping, interdependent structural oppressions of western society and the symbolic violence inherent in capitalism. But I rarely see anyone talking about emotional literacy. It’s rare to see a debate about over-eating. I never see activists being more open about their drink problems and drug habits or the psychological problems fuelling them. Nobody ever seems to be writing a dissertation on the link between emotional stress and chronic illness or writing an op-ed about how they managed to give up smoking. As if somehow, these day-to-day problems are less consequential to the poor than the musings of Karl Marx.’ I once had an eye opening discussion with a former colleague of mine who came from a lower income background than mine. I remember espousing the idea that people in poverty were a product of their environment and couldn’t be expected to take full responsibility for what happened to them given they were coming from such disadvantaged backgrounds. Looking back on it, I was a tragically cliched middle class person in my approach to poverty! My colleague told me that this kind of thinking robbed lower income people of their agency and dignity. ‘Why haven’t I become a product of my environment?’, he asked me and I struggled to give a decent response. His theory was that it took him a huge amount of work and sacrifice to do it and that most people didn’t work as hard as he had. ‘But if you’re living a shitty life on a shitty council estate, do you want that to be your fault or somebody else’s?’ he asked me, ‘of course, you’d rather say it’s someone else's’, he concluded. I don’t think that his reasoning applies to all people living in poverty. Far from it, the reality is probably much more nuanced and complex than this rather black and white analysis makes allowance for. But I do remember suddenly realising how patronising my views were. McGarvey captures this brilliantly when he writes, ‘at some point, I started believing the lie that I was not responsible for my own thoughts, feelings and actions. That these were all by-products of a system that mistreated and excluded me.’


Similarly, across the class spectrum, it’s recently become fashionable to complain about Donald Trump’s presidency in America. McGarvey writes about being criticised by a fellow activist for bringing this up in a panel discussion. I see lots of people I know Trump bashing too. In no way do I feel like Donald Trump is a positive person or leader but I also don’t see how I can lay all the problems in the world at his doorstep. Wouldn’t I be better served trying to ‘be the change I want to see in the world’, however cliched that Ghandi quote has become? As McGarvey wisely points out, most of us have a lot of work to do in overcoming our own personal demons, whatever they may be, and Trump has nothing to do with these. I felt like this was one of the best parts of the book.


I wrote at the beginning that I had a mixed reaction to this book. A lot of this was to do with his confusing views on public spending and social work. Some of his criticisms are, to my mind, incorrect, confused or contradictory. For example:

At the beginning of the book he writes about how the news agenda is set by middle class people and gives the example of how a family taking the council to court over their decision to take their child out of school for a holiday was attracting more attention than a change in child benefit provision. However, he also acknowledges that people want to hear his ‘misery memoir’, clearly indicating that there is a place for working class issues in an undeniably middle class media. To my mind, the media focuses on dramatic issues and doesn’t care which class they come from. This is the reason why plane crashes get more coverage than traffic accidents even though the latter kills millions more than the former. Seeing everything through a class lens isn’t accurate in this instance.
He writes, ‘once you see the mechanics of the poverty industry up close, you realise it’s in a state of permanent growth and that without individuals, families and communities in crisis there would no longer be a role for these massive institutions.’ This seems to give the impression that there is a conspiracy to keep people poor and exploit them, which I’ve never seen any evidence for. Poverty costs society a huge amount in various ways that McGarvey eloquently describes in other passages of the book. So how could anyone, either rationally or morally, want it to continue? He also criticises austerity cuts in other passages of the book, which is odd if he really sees government spending as part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course, I’m not trying to say the government is perfect and totally free from bad decision making and bureaucracy but all large institutions suffer from these problems and to suggest that it is malicious strikes me as unfair and unsubstantiated.
He writes, ‘even the good guys make a mint from social deprivation’. By the standards of the middle class, no one in social work is making a mint. These people could be working in the private sector and making far more money so it struck me as unfair to have a go at people who have made personal financial sacrifices to try and help solve social problems. Again, not everyone’s perfect but this criticism struck me as unwarranted. Equally, he writes about his own working experiences in prisons, libraries and schools all of which, I am assuming, are paid for by the government but he doesn’t seem to see himself as part of the problem. Nor do I, to be clear, I think social work is necessary, demanding, largely underpaid and underappreciated. But how can he criticise this kind of work and also do it himself? It’s confused and contradictory.
He writes ‘the tools to fix the place are already here rather than parachuting government initiatives in who don’t understand the area. They want us to do work that looks good and sounds good; but isn’t always good.’ Again, I’m sure this is true in some cases but to use such a broad brush strikes me as incorrect. He also writes about the positive help he received from organisations like The Firestation, The Notre Dame Centre and The Prince’s Trust. These organisations don’t seem to be located in his community but are written about in a positive way so his criticism ends up looking contradictory. I’m also assuming that all these organisations receive at least some government funding, which, like all assumptions, may be incorrect! But would he really have been better off if The Firestation weren’t there to help house him when he was homeless and apply for the benefits he was entitled to? He explicitly mentions the Notre Dame Centre as providing him with a welcome opportunity to leave his area and go to the more affluent West End of Glasgow; should they be included in his criticism of parachutists?
Those who provide social services come in for some pretty harsh treatment. He writes, ‘success is not eradicating poverty but parachuting in and leaving a ‘legacy’. And when you up and leave, withdrawing your resources and expertise as you go, if a legacy hasn’t materialised, one is simply fabricated.’ This may be true in some instances but McGarvey doesn’t give any examples and I feel like if you’re going to make accusations like this then you should really back them up. I felt like it was an unsubstantiated rant at some points, which isn’t a crime in itself, but the argument would have been so much more powerful and persuasive if it had been supported by facts.

That’s probably enough examples for now! In summary, I felt the book argued against itself sometimes and made too many unsupported claims for my liking.


McGarvey writes some interesting reflections on how middle class people interact with poverty. For example, his description of how he quickly became less popular as a poverty media personality when he started to ask uncomfortable questions like, ‘Who makes the decisions about your budget?’ and ‘How do we solve poverty if all your jobs depend on it?’ is thought provoking. He writes, ‘What I soon learned was that, no matter your background, you are cast out the second you offend the people who’re in charge of your empowerment. Sometimes it’s a person, other times it’s an organisation. Sometimes it’s a movement and other times it’s a political party. But the minute you start telling your story in service of your own agenda and not theirs, you’re discarded. Your criticism is dismissed as not being constructive. Your anger is attributed to your mental health problems and everything about you that people once applauded becomes a stick they beat you with. Look out for these people. The people who pay wonderful lip service to giving the working class a voice, but who start to look very nervous whenever we open our mouths to speak.’ Some of this strikes me as true. There is always a power dynamic to any situation and this can often create perverse outcomes. Other good points I enjoyed were:

The decline of libraries and the impact this is having on lower income communities was described eloquently and accurately. I recently went to renew my parking permit at the council offices where I live and was told that this service had been moved. When I went to the new address it was in a library in a less affluent area of the city. First, I thought it was strange that half of the library reception area and one meeting room had been dedicated to council activities. Worse, was the fact that the library was no longer a quiet and peaceful place conducive to work and concentration. People were constantly coming and going, asking questions of the library staff in the mistaken belief that they worked for the council and generally disturbing the atmosphere. As McGarvey rightly points out, ‘the library is one of the few places in a deprived community that is quiet enough to hear yourself think’. The kind of repurposing he writes about has led to them becoming ‘busy, often quite noisy places, which seriously defeats their intended purpose.’ He goes on to explain, ‘essentially, the community centre is being imposed on the library to streamline the service in order to justify keeping the library open.’ This strikes me as a terrible loss to those communities that are unlucky enough to suffer this fate. In the instance of my experience, I would also question why it had been moved to a less affluent area on the outskirts of the city and not to a more central location. Equally, McGarvey’s accurate description of the importance of libraries in communities makes me wonder why he is so critical of government spending in poorer communities. Perhaps he is talking about different types of spending but he doesn’t make this clear and that’s why it’s strange to read such scathing criticism of ‘these massive institutions’ in the same book as such a well argued description of their benefits and importance.
The example of the council’s spending on the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow was very well drawn. He describes ‘a public Wi-Fi system, designed especially for the games so that affluent international sports fans could explore the city without having to log out of Facebook’. Meanwhile, in the same city, it can take up to 15 minutes to log on to an antiquated computer in his local community centre. Of course, there are arguments that could be made about how all the money spent on the Commonwealth Games is good for Glasgow’s global image and brand and will result in increased investment in the city, eventually leading to more jobs etc. etc. I think most of this is sophistry and that events like the Commonwealth Games are largely an excuse for government bigwigs to have a taxpayer funded jolly. The example of recent football World Cups suggests even more sinister motivations may be in play too. I may not be right about this, but McGarvey’s anger seems totally justified in this instance.
The section about ‘The Barn’ was very good insofar as it expressed what people working on the front line of poverty felt about how best to alleviate it. The sentence, ‘In an ideal world we would get funded for building trusting relationships with young people’ seemed so sensible and full of truth. What almost everyone needs, and most middle class people get from their families without giving it a second thought, are trusting relationships. This kind of writing began to give me an insight into the vitriol McGarvey expresses in the unsubstantiated rants against government agencies. If staff at The Barn are working to build lasting, trusting relationships but every four years a new government comes in with new initiatives to ‘solve’ poverty or cut spending, I can understand how frustrating and counterproductive that could be. Politicising poverty probably does result in a demand for statistics to make it seem like things are getting better or to justify money being spent when a government has promised to cut the budget. However, McGarvey doesn’t make this link or provide this evidence. As a reader, there is one chapter slagging off government agencies approach to poverty and then another, totally unconnected one, singing the praises of The Barn. I’m sure the staff at The Barn could provide plenty of examples to support but the type of criticism McGarvey makes in other passages of the book. But they are left unsupported and are much less powerful because of this. As opposed to a tightly argued comment, which it seems like it could become with the addition of facts, it’s left as an unsubstantiated rant. Readers are left to read between the lines and make assumptions about what he might be writing about and it would be so much better, and more coherent, if these connections were made explicit.
McGarvey is a really honest and self-critical writer. I have a lot of admiration for this as it’s not an easy thing to do. The book contains multiple sections where he takes a step back from a belief he’s strongly adhered to in the past and places it in a new context. Gaining this kind of perspective on yourself, your ideas and your shortcomings is, I know from my own experience, difficult and painful work and he should be congratulated for doing it in such a public way. When he discusses how he attacked artist Ellie Harrison’s publically funded project to stay in Glasgow for a year it’s really refreshing to see someone being honest about their mistakes and admitting when they’re wrong. In a section dripping with sarcasm he writes about how he attacked her, ‘believing myself to be well informed and deeply virtuous, unaware of how personal resentment was subtly directing my thinking. I am sure you have no idea what I’m talking about.’ I definitely know what he is talking about and I think anyone who claims they don’t isn’t being honest with themselves!

There were a few sundry sections of the book that I felt were either inaccurate or dealt with deep, complicated issues in too precursory a manner. When he writes about Brexit, ‘when people vote against their own interests because they don’t think it’s going to matter either way.’ It’s not clear to me that many working class people in Glasgow did vote for Brexit. Turnout was only 56% in the city and the results show voters voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU (67%). Even if we suppose they did vote for Brexit, which I don’t see much evidence for, how can he possibly say that it’s not in their interests to do so? No one even knows what form Brexit will take yet, let alone what it’s legacy will be in 10 or 20 years for working class people in Glasgow. It’s not possible to predict the future and I thought this section was misplaced and arrogant.


The discussion of the rise of intersectionality, social justice and identity politics was similar. I’m certainly no expert on this complicated topic but it seems unfair to me to dismiss it so summarily. Some of the points he makes are valid, like the lack of accountability in social media driven ‘call out’ campaigns. He’s making a good point when he writes, ‘ultimately, while holding everyone else to account, this culture is itself accountable to no one.’ He also raises an interesting idea when he writes of multinationals seeming endorsement of the social justice agenda in their marketing, ‘it’s certainly no bad thing that multinational companies like Pepsi, General Electric, Pfizer, Microsoft and Apple are using their clout to advance social justice. But it begs the question: what’s in it for them? Intersectionality in its current form, rather than an irritant to privilege, atomises society into competing political factions and undermines what really frightens powerful people: a well organised, educated and unified working class.’ However, I’m fairly sure these firms just do what their PR departments or advisors tell them to and those departments are just trying to concur with whatever they perceive the zeitgeist to be amongst the consumers they are targeting. The idea of a global conspiracy to keep the poor atomised assumes a level of collaboration that simply doesn’t exist, to my mind.


Lastly, and much more frivolously, McGarvey sometimes writes about drugs like none of his readers have ever taken any. He opines, ‘some people don’t get bad come-downs because they are not running away from anything when they get high.’ In my experience this is true of precisely zero people that I’ve ever met and is a bit like saying some people don’t get drunk when they drink! Of course, I can’t speak for everyone else’s experience but nor can McGarvey and I can only use my own experience and the reports other people give me of theirs. In the same manner, he seems to dramatise a, ‘Sunday morning...obligatory off-sales run after a night of partying’ when anyone who lives in Scotland and has had an all nighter on a Saturday knows you can’t buy booze until 12.30pm. It sometimes feels like he’s trying to make the safari more exciting for the punters.


This is an interesting book with some interesting ideas that suffers from being a bit haphazard and not fully developing or supporting the ideas it contains. There are good sections but overall it can seem contradictory. The style is a little self conscious and egotistical for my taste too. In the end, McGarvey adopts quite a conciliatory and conservative tone writing, ‘our system is riddled with internal contradiction, injustice and corruption, but is also very dynamic and offers a great many freedoms. For example, our current system, for all its flaws, is so dynamic that it can provide food, shelter and employment, as well as education, training and resources, for the very movements that are openly trying to overthrow it. This sort of liberty is not to be sneered at or taken for granted.’ While I would broadly agree with what he’s saying here, this kind of conclusion makes the more extreme sections of the book seem a bit incoherent. At some points he seems to be saying all government spending on poverty is a sham designed to keep poor people poor. This isn’t a bad book but it’s not amazing either.