When he encounters members of those groups he affects to despise – people like landowner Dee Ward – he finds them likeable, without relinquishing his distaste for their privilege.

It is a skill he first displayed in his Orwell Prize-winning debut, 2017’s Poverty Safari, but has sharpened since. It created a system of Bucket Schools for the working class, albeit with better teachers than the untrained schoolmasters of the élite establishments, but with a built-in sense of failure. When it comes to the haves and the have-nots in Britain, you don’t have to look far to see the damage. In many ways my upbringing in working class West Belfast in the seventies mean that the social distance between DMcG and me is relatively small. In The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain he looks at the huge gulf – geographic, economic and cultural – between those who make decisions and the people on the receiving end of them.YES: Darren McGarvey delivers a searing indictment of the UK system that everyone needs to read, regardless of their individual place and circumstances. All of author and documentary-maker Darren McGarvey’s work is a provocation, and I am easily provoked.

The following quote picked at random illustrates: "the British Welfare State is a vast, malevolent enterprise, engaged in the daily manufacture of death, despair and dysfunction, perpetrated from behind an administrative perimeter, fortified by media-generated public ignorance and a political class, spanning all parties, which is either complicit in the cruelty or skimming over the detail. As someone with long term health issues I live it but it still surprised me how insidious class privilege is in twenty-first century Britain. But as ever, his mission was to get behind the facade and use his experiences of poverty and want to explore deep social problems and the huge imbalances of power that they point up.Y'all who read this book are almost certainly well-spoken, possibly even "intellectual" (a dirty word in Anglophone circles, nearly as bad as "immigrant").

He does his best to keep the reader facing the unpleasant facts, even going to the lengths of reminding us middle-class bas. Possibly an uncomfortable read for the mandarins in British politics, but that's exactly the reason this book should be taken seriously. For a contemporary book written by an ardent Scottish nationalist, this work seems strangely disconnected from time. His bestselling and acclaimed first book Poverty Safari was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018.

The more I thought about it, the more I started wondering what those long-dead ghosts of the past would make of us if they could see us now, and I felt ashamed. At times I found this quite repetitive and would lose a bit of steam however the next chapter usually picked right back up. I was promoted to the point that all I was used for was sorting out conflict and complaint for every contract across the region. The problem was also that the managers coordinating the building works (and the housing officers involved) regarded most of the tenants as an alien species, beneath their contempt and only out to screw the system and claim compensation. I also found his throwaway line that sexism and racism were imported and spread by rich people to be laughable.