Class issues are concealed beneath a progressive veneer as identity politics becomes another vehicle for the socially mobile to dominate every aspect of public life.”

Some good things - the critique on the left for the most part was facts, cancel culture is dead out (not about it), facts poverty is not properly analysed and the part stress plays in all aspects of life.

I also found this book difficult to read because I kept getting angry while reading it. Not Darren's fault, just emotions being triggered. If I can learn a lesson from his story, it will be to examine why I got so angry.

We must open another frontier in politics. Not one based on railing against the system, but about scrutinising our own thinking and behaviour. One of which is about reclaiming the idea of personal responsibility from a rampant and socially misguided right wing that has come to monopolise it. A new leftism that is not only about advocating radical change but also about learning to take ownership of as many of our problems as we can, so that we may begin rebuilding the depleted human capacity in our poorest communities. At first glance, Poverty Safari may seem an unusual choice of book for an educational psychologist (EP) to read. It’s not obviously about psychology; it initially appears far more relevant to disciplines such as sociology, economics, politics, or geography.Poverty Safari and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting deal with issues of poverty, deprivation and addiction in different ways – Poverty Safari through memoir and Trainspotting in fiction. Which book provides more insight and/or is more realistic?

McGarvey’s portrayal of the madness that followed the Brexit vote is perceptive, and again, worth quoting at length: McGarvey wants his privileged audience to see and hear the anger and frustration of poor communities who feel socially, economically, and politically disenfranchised. McGarvey doesn’t pull his punches, arguing cogently that factors such as unemployment, poorly paid jobs, poor quality housing have created the conditions for the prevalence of social maladies such as drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and mental health difficulties. These conditions have contributed to the frustrated disillusionment found amongst many working-class communities. It makes for challenging reading. Prejudicial and structural barriersAs a result, the allocation of funds and resources intended to help poor communities become a structural barrier due to the explicit and implicit strings that are attached. Competing views of social justice McGarvey is able to connect with his students because his own life has been shaped by the dual forces of poverty and violence. He grew up in Pollok, a poor, working-class neighborhood on the southside of Glasgow. In the early nineties, when McGarvey was a child, this area often ranked as one of the most economically deprived places in Europe. The strength of this book is the criticism of the tribal nature of politics. Too much time spent on trying to prove yourself right and your political rivals wrong for the sake of ego, rather than thinking about what we could do now if only we listened to each other a bit more and occasionally admitted we were wrong and your opponents might have the odd good idea and not be inherently evil. I thought this might have been a good place to mention voting systems, and the campaigns by the Electoral Reform Society and Make Votes Matter to ditch the archaic FPTP and to bring in fairer systems that reward collaborative working and let more of the small voices be heard, but there is only so much you can mention in a single book. 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.