Aye Write: Darren McGarvey - The Social Distance Between Us
22nd May 2022
8.00pm - 9.00pm
£13.20 (£12 ticket charge & 10% booking fee)
Adult
Over 14s only. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.
Tramway
View map
Book tickets
Bookings subject to transaction fees: Online - £1.50/ Phone bookings - £1.75
The much-anticipated follow-up to Poverty
Safari from the Glasgow-based rapper, journalist and commentator
From poverty and policing, homelessness and
overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been
failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme
that links all these afflictions: proximity. Proximity is how close we are to
the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever
that action happens to be. Almost every job requires a level of experience and
training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country
- our political class.
The Social Distance Between Us, is about the distance - whether geographical,
economic, or cultural, between those who make decisions and the people on the
receiving end of them. The distance between the affluent and the poor, how
their interests and values diverge, and the assumptions they make about each
other's experiences and intentions in the absence of any meaningful
interaction. How even those with the noblest aims, inadvertently cause harm as
a result of their social remoteness and fail to advance anybody's interests but
their own misguided ones.
Could Britain's problem be, not that there is a
lot of inequality, but that for generations, a small group of people, who know
little about it, have been charged with discussing, debating, and sorting it
out? At what point do we look for answers, not to the people who are hardest
up, but the apparently educated and sophisticated, whose dominance of Britain's
institutions has been virtually unbroken for centuries?
c. Steven Reynolds