Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass

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Are we a profession that seeks to facilitate and empower the solutions that local people advocate to their identified needs? White men from lower class backgrounds, many of whom have suffered social exclusion and abuse, become the whipping boys of privileged students.

Despite growing up identifying as left-wing and hating ‘Tory scum’, McGarvey is scathing about sections of the left. Issues like child abuse, addiction and homelessness are often discussed in isolation, but as anyone working with homeless people, addicts or victims of abuse will tell you, the problems are often interconnected. The replaying of old arguments and perceived victories, the simulation of rich fantasies that go beyond the mundane and into the absurd or extreme. Such an approach could only be dreamt up by people who have no idea of what being born poor is really like.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.

Arguing that both the political left and right misunderstand poverty as it is actually lived, McGarvey sets out what everybody – including himself – could do to change things. The author believes that his life got a lot better when he stopped trying to externalise blame for all of his problems. They regard themselves as champions of the under class and therefore, should any poor folk begin to get their own ideas or, god forbid, rebel against the poverty experts, the blame is laid at the door of the complainants for misunderstanding what is going on. When I look at the left, I see a worrying lack of self-awareness and a pathological belief in the legitimacy of our own resentment which is beginning to undermine the broader objective of social justice.

Those who raise concerns about current immigration policies are often written off as racists and bigots. McGarvey was fast approaching his final deadline for Poverty Safari when he awoke to the horrific and devastating images of Grenfell Tower ablaze. In Pollok and other working-class estates, people feel they are excluded from conversations about their own lives. He makes an interesting observation, which I hope is right: namely, that there is a battle going on for the soul of working-class communities. Poverty comprises many domains of the human experience: social, psychological, emotional, political and cultural.