By his own account, Darren McGarvey’s first 25 years were a real-life version of
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s brutal tale of Scotland’s underclass made into a
searing film by Danny Boyle.

“I could not enjoy the film because it was such a realistic depiction of
drug-addled depravity that it brought memories of my own childhood flooding
back,” writes McGarvey in Poverty Safari, a painfully honest autobiographical
study of deprivation and how society should deal with it.

McGarvey, also a rap artist known as Loki and now in his early thirties, has
turned his life around and become one of the most sought-after social
commentators in Scotland. He has a column in the Scotsman newspaper, appears
frequently on broadcast media, and has a big following on social media, a
position now cemented by this book.

In large part this is because of the compelling nature of his own story and his
fluent, unflinching telling of it, often laced with wry humour. But what has
made McGarvey such a particular figure of attention is his political message. As
the old mainstream desperately seeks a response to Trump and Brexit, McGarvey, a
life-long radical socialist, seems to offer an antidote to populist anger that
transcends left and right. “It’s not rocket science: listen, and those who feel
ignored will re-engage passionately,” he writes.

McGarvey’s upbringing in Pollok, a poor area of Glasgow, forms the narrative of
the book. It is one of deprivation, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, anger
and violence. Born to a teenage mother who descends into alcoholism, McGarvey
describes how, when he was “about five”, she held a kitchen knife to his throat
in a drunken rage.

His mother left home when he was 10 and died of liver disease when he was 15. Of
the five children she left behind, he recounts, four have had alcohol or
substance abuse problems, three have a criminal record and all have been on
state benefits. “And none of us care for Radio 2, yoga or Quorn-based food
products either.”

The book offers a vivid inside account of how the pressures of deprivation
create a spiral in which physical illness, mental illness, addiction and
violence thrive. McGarvey himself becomes hooked on booze, drugs and junk food
and is treated for mental health problems — even as he carves out a position for
himself as a performer and a social activist who presents BBC programmes.

But here McGarvey’s story takes the turn that has caught the political
imagination. He describes a kind of personal epiphany in which he decides he has
to take some personal responsibility for the state he is in, not just blame his
upbringing and society at large. “You are no use to any family, community, cause
or movement unless you are first able to manage, maintain and operate the
machinery of your own life,” he writes.

He applies this message as a way for communities who feel they have had no
voice, and despair of mainstream politics, to be able to effect change; he is
withering about “the poverty industry”, run by the middle classes, for doing
things not “with the community but to it”.

The left, he says, is too bound up in righteous anger and devotion to its
ideological causes to make a practical difference to those who need help; the
far right capitalises on the vacuum left by those who refuse to engage on issues
such as immigration.

McGarvey has not lost his socialist fervour. Rather, he says he wants to reclaim
“the idea of personal responsibility from a rampant and socially misguided right
wing”. He calls for “a new leftism which 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”.

Now sober and off drugs, McGarvey lives with his partner and their baby son. In
keeping with the painful self-examination that marks Poverty Safari, he worries
that “I am being absorbed by the very system I’ve spent my life railing
against”.

He might be right to be concerned. This class warrior who supported Scottish
independence in the 2014 referendum was this month accorded a flattering,
double-page interview spread in the conservative, unionist Scottish Daily Mail.
But his urgently written, articulate and emotional book is a bracing
contribution to the debate about how to fix our broken politics.