Darren McGarvey’s angry study of how ‘remote politics’ has robbed ordinary people of power has solutions that may make uncomfortable reading even for ‘progressives’
, the Scottish writer, broadcaster and rapper Darren McGarvey describes the time he spent in Aberdeen while he was filming a series for the BBC. The city, he muses, may well be Scotland’s most beautiful metropolis, where “beams reflect off the granite, rendering even the most ordinary building prestigious and majestic”.
In Tillydrone, a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the north of the city, McGarvey met Michael, who had “moved from England to work as a scaffolder on the oil and gas rigs but, like many, had fallen on hard times since the [oil price] collapse of 2008”. He told McGarvey that he had been homeless for two years since being evicted from his flat. “I went down south to visit my family, who I hadn’t seen for 30 years,” Michael said.
“He was frozen out by an opaque administrative maze populated by faceless desk-killers,” McGarvey writes. “An organisational jigsaw puzzle where decisions with life-and-death implications are made behind a curtain of unaccountable officialdom.” Herein lies the book’s key theme, which McGarvey wraps up in the term “proximity”: the fact that even at a local level, power tends to operate far away from the people it kicks around and manipulates.
McGarvey asks potent questions about the links between our school systems and a low-end labour market millions of us are only too happy to take advantage of