Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass

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If Scotland’s underclass could speak in a single, articulate, authentic voice to communicate to the rest of us what it’s like to be poor, isolated, brutalised, lost, it would sound very much like this.

Books: Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Books: Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s

Combination of world events/work making me exhausted to my bones (but free Palestine always 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸) coupled with the writing style that I found clunky and jarring and hard to read at times. The way that McGarvey dismisses all the professional middle-class support workers who try to help him out - of course, he would have no concept that some of those support workers would come from backgrounds just like his, because he was too self-centred to think of that. Like Orwell, Darren McGarvey 'has a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts', giving insight with pathos and identifying hypocrisy deftly.The points made about the importance of listening other peoples point of view were worth making too.

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s

The welfare system is strongly criticised because McGarvey regards it as a punitive system for the poor and vulnerable devised by people with no real comprehension of what it is to be poor. It's counter-intuitive to accept responsibility for certain things, particularly when our circumstances are beyond our control. McGarvey explains that this trivial matter got coverage over a new law passed on tax credits, (a law which would greatly hurt the poorly paid workers of the UK), where women would be limited to claiming money for no more than two children, but he highlights a rape clause, where if the woman can prove that she was raped then she would be allowed to claim for a third child. McGarvey has come up with a deeply refreshing and powerful book, that mixes memoir with social politics and ultimately he has given a clear and resonant voice to the multitudes that are too often ignored, patronised and punished by the ruling political elite. If The Road To Wigan Pier had been written by a Wigan miner and not an Etonian rebel, this is what might have been achieved.He used intersectionality and his critique of it to further his own arguments but the way he described it made me think he didn’t quite get it - as he misses off class that Kimberly Crenshaw would kmt at.

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain s Books: Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain s

I’m sure the intention was sincere but, as other reviewers have said, this reads too much like a political statement to me. A blistering analysis of the issues facing the voiceless and the social mechanisms that hobble progress, all wrapped up in an unput-downable memoir. Things that would have shocked you in the past, whether it be lying to people or stealing money, become as routine as addiction and the dishonesty that feeds it leaves you morally deformed. My criticism would be the ease with which McGarvey dismisses some apparently abstract concerns that he thinks are mainly of interest to the middle-classes. There is lots that I really enjoyed here, but the structure proved somewhat frustrating: it is only until the second half of the book, and really, the very last chapter that McGarvey seems to really spell out his most important point (and the most important lesson he’s learnt for his own life): that of taking personal responsibility.As well as white male privilege, intersectionality should allow us to better understand the phenomenon of affluent students on the campuses of elite western universities attempting to control how the rest of us think and discuss our own experiences, claiming to speak on our behalf while freezing us out of the conversation. It's his bitter proof against the populist right as well as the Left, whose socioeconomic abstractions cannot appeal anymore. Instead, there is a very worthwhile discussion of the perils of confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance, which impressively, presumably deliberately, doesn't use the terms.