Why it’s time we all started the C-word in public again
IN a few days, my new documentary series airs on BBC Scotland. It’s called Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars and you will never guess what it’s about.
Yes, anyone even vaguely familiar with my work over the years will know that the C-word is a regular fixture in my daily vocabulary. The ironic thing about that is that I dislike talking about class.
You wouldn’t guess that from the incessant way I go on about it, but I do. Imagine every day, physicists had to argue that gravity is real. How exhausted, disheartened they would be, pleading with the powers that be that the reason people don’t fall off the Earth is the same reason it rotates around the Sun.
Class is a bit like gravity. It’s a mysterious force that bears down on some more than others.
Indeed, some are so unaware of its effects that they may go through their entire lives largely oblivious to how it shapes their experiences, identities and opportunities.
Just as the landed gentry, inheriting acreage beyond our comprehension merely by virtue of birth, may be unable to perceive quite how unfair that is in a so-called meritocracy, millions of people found further down the ladder can barely describe precisely why their lives feel so exhausting and thankless.
For nearly four decades, class as a concept has been all but flushed from public discourse and replaced with warm fuzzy terms like “social mobility” and phrases like “poverty of aspiration”. Despite thousands of academic papers, books and films evidencing or exploring its effects, you will rarely hear a top-flight politician refer to it.
While I recognise that not every single aspect of life can be viewed through the class lens, we do ourselves and wider society a great disservice by dancing around it.
What better explains the recent exam algorithm fiasco where the “integrity of the whole system” was contingent on a certain percentage of school kids from deprived postcodes doing less well than better-off kids?
What better accounts for the fact some people during the pandemic have to jump through hoops for paltry sums of money to survive while others are sent thousands of pounds, no questions asked, every four months?
How many of Scotland’s 7500 prison population is middle or upper-class?
How many judges hail from housing estates?
How should we account for the 30,000 children in Scotland who will suffer the trauma of parental imprisonment this year?
The 109 children and young people who will be taken into care across the UK within the next 24 hours?
And how do we account for the fact that in doing so, their chances of being drawn into the criminal justice system, becoming homeless or dying by suicide increase significantly?
Like I said, I don’t enjoy talking about class. I am aware of the fine line I walk between campaigning writer and cringey self-parody. Why has talking about class become such a potentially awkward thing to do? Whose interests are served by this? And what has the overall effect been on the social divides the concept of class was created to describe?
Hopefully, our films go some way to exploring some of these issues.
But my biggest hope is that people for whom class inequality is often a matter of life and death, will resurrect the dead language of class and repurpose it for a 21st century where this topic is more relevant than ever before.