Darren McGarvey's Class Wars

But I’m also university-educated (I know, it’s surprising), work(ed) in an office (it’s been the sofa since the pandemic started), and I’m a property owner. I also listen to Radio 4 and own the odd book of poetry. So that makes me middle-class, right?

But, then again, I don’t ski or have a second car or a house in France or watch Bake Off. So, am I really?

These days only a quarter of the British population are classed as working class, yet 60 per cent of us still believe we are.

Class, how we identify ourselves, perhaps misidentify ourselves, is very much at the heart of the new BBC Scotland series Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars.

The author and rapper who grew up in Pollok in a family that knew all about poverty has been wrestling with these questions himself of late. Since the success of his Orwell Prize-winning book Poverty Safari, McGarvey has himself found offered a measure of social mobility he never expected.

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“Doors that were closed to me previously were suddenly flung open,” he tells me on a Zoom call from his home in East Kilbride.

“I received more opportunities in a 12-month period than most people will be given in their lives.”

The result left him feeling like “a fish out of water”. All of which prompted him to look at Scotland through the lens of class.

To do so, he met self-made millionaires, dressed in tweed, took up polo, cricket and grouse-shooting and asked the question, is class still a thing in the 21st century?

The answer? Hell, yes.

“It’s like saying, ‘Is gravity still a thing?’” McGarvey points out. “If you told me you don’t believe in gravity, that’s fine. But it doesn’t change the tremendous force that gravity exerts over everything.”

And, so, in the new series McGarvey addresses the issue of social mobility (or lack of it), how class can be defined not just by our income but by the accent we speak with and the sports we play.

McGarvey is an articulate, sometimes even angry advocate. There’s a moment in the first episode when he meets butler Simeon Rosset for lessons on how to be a gentleman. When McGarvey is told to take his hands out of his pockets, you can see him bristle.

One of the pleasures of the series (and of talking to McGarvey for that matter) is to hear a coherent argument that is effectively a class critique, one largely removed from public discourse.

“Tremendous effort has been made to flush the language of class out of our lexicons because if you flush the language out then people can’t describe what’s actually happening,” McGarvey suggests.

“Then they substitute that with myths about meritocracy, or poverty of aspiration, or social mobility. And these are comforting stories. And sometimes they might actually be real.”

Watching the first episode reminded me of something that should be obvious but perhaps isn’t. That what constitutes being working class has changed hugely over the last 40 years.

I am now in my late fifties. McGarvey is in his mid-thirties. The working-class world he grew up in was totally different from mine. I grew up in a time of full(ish) employment, when unions had a measure of power, when further education with a full grant was something I could (and did) aspire to. When social mobility wasn’t entirely impossible.

“The golden age of social mobility,” McGarvey calls it. “The post-war consensus where it was understood that you have to rein in a free market with social insurances that protect people who the free market doesn’t serve - the sick, the vulnerable people who can’t be monetised, people who can’t be viewed as capital.”

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In the wake of Thatcherism, many of those advantages were done away with.

“When we moved into this phase I think there was a genuine belief on the part of free-market fundamentalists that the free market was a liberating force.

“There are aspects of the state that are laborious and slow to respond, and the rules of supply-and-demand are very effective in certain instances.

“But this isn’t how you should organise human life. This isn’t how you should organise communities.

“What is most frustrating is a lot of people benefit from the rights and norms that were fought for by working-class people previously, things like the 40-hour week. When people then turn around and start dismissing the idea of trade unions it shows they are completely dislocated from social history. They believe the idea that this was benevolently given to us by powerful people when it always has to be fought for.”

How, I wonder, did making the series challenge his own ideas? “I went into certain sequences, particularly around land ownership, with the intent to press or probe in a way that maybe a certain section of my audience would find quite satisfying, and subsequently found myself disarmed by a person’s humanity, a person’s love of nature, a person’s sensitivity to the inequalities that are being discussed.”

Class, he realises, can also be an identity. And, at times, a confining one. There were experiences in his younger years that he might have pursued, he realises now, but didn’t. “I bought into the idea that because of where I come from I shouldn’t.

“It wasn’t until Denise Mina suggested to me, ‘Have you ever thought about writing a book?’ that the idea that I could write a book even occurred to me.

“I don’t know that that all can be attributed to the class system. Some of that is my personal neurosis.”

He thinks back to that bristling moment in the first episode when he was asked to take his hands out of his pockets.

“Part of that was the way he spoke to me. When he said, ‘Take your hands out of your pockets,’ it took me back somewhere and I’m not sure where.

“What the viewer gets is an insight into the sort of person that I have learned to conceal as I move up the social scale. Sometimes he makes an appearance every now and then. And that was as surprising to me as it might be to some of the viewers.”

We talk for a moment about the impact of social media on class and that leads me to mention Marcus Rashford, a working-class man who has used his fame as a footballer to speak out about child poverty. A working-class hero, if you will.

“There are two ways of looking at Rashford,” McGarvey suggests, “one exactly as you have described. He’s someone who has been raised well. Even though he comes from modest circumstances, he has a very strong value system, very strong class-consciousness and he raises the consciousness of others by making his values visible.

“He also does it in quite an intelligent way with an understanding of things like social media. And so, I think, he disarms a lot of people who would otherwise go after someone with left-leaning pretensions like him. The fact that he’s a footballer also brings him a certain level of visibility.

“But beyond that, Marcus Rashford fulfils a particular place in our culture which always needs to be occupied by someone which is the ‘working-class hero’ space.

“So, what he also does, unfortunately – and this is not something he intends to do – but he gives a lot of people on social media the feeling that someone has dealt with child poverty now.

And, he adds, Rashford is one individual. “He can’t be bringing people’s awareness constantly to the structural problems that exist in this country which are increasingly undeniable.

“So, unfortunately, it’s bittersweet because on one hand an issue gets a lot of prominence, a lot of politicians circle the wagons to attack or milk it. But at the same time when his prominence fades the issue fades, and that’s what’s wrong when we hang these issues on the coattails of celebrities because the issue is only as visible as they are, and every star rises and falls.”

Darren McGarvey wants to help change the world with his TV series. How, I ask finally, has the TV series changed him? Which of the many activities he tried out will he keep up?

“My son’s on a waiting list for horse riding lessons now. I didn’t like the polo and I wasn’t very good at it, but I liked the horses and I thought to myself this would be a great thing for me and my son to do together when all this is over. Just to do that with him would be cool.”

Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars begins on BBC Scotland, Tuesday, 10pm