Mae cyllid yn anilol cyn tryt ym mwrdd yn neud o'r blaen dod y cael ei chydnog wrthaf. Felly, ddweud yn ymgyrch gwaith. Fi eich ymdeg kczyn yma, Ken McIntosh ar y godi練biydd. Mae'n cyrustaeth i'n amlwydd ar y cwsgol cofais i ddweud, a'r festïf ar gyfer Llywodraeth yn ymdeg. Erdoftiau yn y 14 yr, ac mae'n caisgol a Llywodraeth a ddigon ni, yr éch Republic Genedlaeth am yn periatocredaeth.äl F ק point uch chi'n gwybod dwi ddim medicine per Explam edrydsun gyda ddiogel tan chyrau gyda d甲 ddeikahol y byd, ac diogel i postsinnran cyddiol a dalygu yn ni triedg. Diolch yr eme yr Gru GСп sydd wedi cychyd y amddangos o'r ddechrau a gyda hollinsau ein hy gardens遊ib per construct understoodd. Roi diolch pob clInterio chi- 더 ei ddefnyddio er fyddai diolch i fusknu ли� fountain, whithgaf, chi ei ddefnyddio hyffordgoi gyntaf, maeth allu am gweithстиol, because ond yn siwet. I want to introduce, if I can, our guest this evening, Darren McArvy, also known as Loki. Darren is a writer, commentator, performer, and community activist. Until poverty safari catapulted him to recognition as a writer, Darren was best known as the rapper Loki, having recorded numerous albums as a hip-hop artist. Darren grew up in Pollock in Glasgow. His mother was an alcoholic who died when he was 17 years old. Caired for by his father, who encouraged Darren and his siblings' creativity and urged them to express themselves through music. He merged his love of music with his fascination with words. Darren developed an expansive vocabulary at a young age and he credits that as helping him understand and translate life's experiences. Those experiences included dealing with his mother's death, his own drinking, drug and food problems, mental health issues, homelessness and living on disability allowance, all of which he has used as inspiration in his writing. Darren has previously worked as everything from a bingo caller to a voluntary community worker as a member of the Poverty Truth Commission, rapper in residence at the Violence Reduction Unit and as a co-writer with the National Theatre of Scotland. He's just been announced, just today, as one of the new presenters for BBC Scotland's new channel to be launched in February next year. He studied journalism at Glasgow Clyde College and regularly writes for The Daily Record, The Guardian and Hollywood magazine. His book, Poverty Safari, Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass, won the prestigious Orwell Prize in 2018 and has been praised by everyone from Ken Loach to Irvine Welsh, First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon and J. K. Rowling, who is quoted as saying, "...it is hard to think of a more timely, powerful or necessary book." He recently played to sold-out audiences when he took his Poverty Safari live show to the Edinburgh Fringe, featuring elements of rap, comedy and spoken word to explore some of his book's central themes of social inequality, political division and class through an artistic lens. Darren lives in East Kilbride with his partner and two young children. Please join me in welcoming Darren McArvy. Apologies for the long intro. I hope you recognise yourself in that introduction as well. It's very well researched. I know you didn't. I know you didn't. I've got an army of people, yes. I want to start with one of the things you said there about your own eloquence. How did you become so articulate? Your education was interrupted and yet it has catapulted you to national promise as a writer and as a speaker and as a performer. Well, there are two answers to the question. One is the polite answer. This is an Edinburgh audience. This is a question that I get a lot and over the years I've decided to be a bit more magnanimous and how I respond to it. So the reason that I'm able to speak the way that I speak is because I come from a family where we're all very expressive. I encourage to express ourselves, whether it be through music or writing or activism. I guess, for me, then I understood the power of words early on because of the reactions that you would get from people around you based on the things that you would say. And I just always found it fascinating. And then also the fact that in the community that I grew up in there was certain restrictions on how you could speak. And that fascinated me because I thought, well, why is this a red line?  What sort of message is that telling me about what sort of person I'm supposed to be and how am I going to navigate that? So that's the polite answer. The other answer is why wouldn't I be articulate? I think it's not why you wouldn't be articulate, but you're exceptionally so. Compared to who, though. Compared to everybody. No, I'm down with that. Maybe it's me being defensive, but I always take it as I'm more... I'm able to put words together unlike the usual scruff that you hear from. That's the way I interpret it. But I think there's something in it and how communities that I come from and a lot of people in here probably come from how we are framed when we do well. So we're always framed as a sort of diamond in the rough or a kind of success story because that's a kind of popular media trope. So it creates a perception to people outside that community that someone like me is an exception to the rule when actually if there were more opportunities and there wasn't so much dysfunction to navigate, then there would definitely be a lot more people. Although I see a lot of Scottish working class writers doing very well, to be honest, and a lot of the best-sellers lists for non-fiction and all of that as well. So I do think... I've learned that it's good to have the polite answer and the more frank answer because really you're trying to educate people where they might have a blind spot and not disconnect because something they say might offend you. No, there's no doubt that the contrast, there's no doubt at all that the contrast between your own fluency with words and your own background is a thing that is remarked upon. But it's more than that, it's the fact that you're actually talking in your book about this, about the fact that you have to choose to limit your vocabulary in so many situations. You deliberately have to.  I had to add the prefix, the vulgar prefix, so the more articulate and expressive word, beautiful is more of an expressive word, isn't it? So it's kind of nested in that vulgarity. And then that means I might get a pass. The other reason why I became tuned into words was because I wasn't a great reader, and I found that I could learn what I otherwise might learn from a book by listening to other people talk about things, so I was always tuned in. And it's worked out quite well for me because one of the reasons why I'm able to sometimes, annoyingly perhaps for some, to engage with multiple perspectives simultaneously and understand the different moral worlds that people are coming from is because I'm a sucker for anybody who talks well. So before I've decided whether I agree with someone or not, I'm really committed to whatever it is that they're trying to say, and I'm really trying to hear them, not because I want to agree with them or because I necessarily think they're personally interested or even that their ideas are valid, but because the words are like music. So if they're put together in a certain way, then it just perks my ear up, and I find that it becomes much easier for me to internalise what's written in between the words, what the subtext is, where they're coming from. And then even if I come to a point where I decide I understand that point like earlier on, I was in a discussion with a guy who's like a libertarian, and I don't want to assume what everybody in here does and doesn't know. Of all the political perspectives the libertarian viewpoint is the most interesting to me because people who see themselves as libertarian almost pride themselves in the fact that they don't let their compassion overrule their mind. It's all about rational objectivity and individualism, and these are quite good principles in the right sort of moderation. But it's funny as well because there's lots of overlap, you know, we mean in the traditional libertarian view where libertarians will tend to believe in the good judgment of working class people to make decisions about what they eat, what they drink, don't mess nanny state, and as much as I disagree with that, sometimes I kind of like anyone who's like, come on, the working class people, just by default. So it means I can listen to a libertarian, understand where they're coming from, reflect their viewpoint back at them, and at the same time think, you do know you're talking a lot of garbage though, don't you? If I have to. You've already touched on about five things I want to go off on here, including individual, hopefully we'll come back to them, individual responsibility, but in this case you mentioned the fact that you hadn't read. See, I think I assumed before I read your book that you'd read your way to, you'd educated yourself, particularly in language through reading, but you didn't, you stage right away the best start, you struggled with reading, which is intriguing. Because the words themselves, your use of language, has been a route to social mobility now, you might, but I think social mobility is quite key to the things that you talk about, but it has been your passport to success, has it not? Yeah, certainly professionally I, that the, when I say I haven't read books, I just mean in the traditional format, handheld and in the traditional way that a person would read a book from front to back. Now that might sound funny, but I've consumed millions of words. I remember listening to the audiobook of 1984 and listening to it in the wrong order, which makes for a very interesting experience. And because it's the kind of thing that I would put on at night, almost to self-soothe, like if I was recovering from a few nights, a few weeks on it, right? I would have these things on in the background, and that was the time when I started getting access to the internet so I was able to find YouTube and find content that I wouldn't otherwise have. And I think YouTube has fundamentally changed the way a lot of us learn, you know, specifically a kind of specific generation. It's not necessarily about doing the deep dive and understanding one topic from one perspective all the way down. It's about now, it's about what do I need to know? Let me go and find a bit of that, understand that and then jump over here and then jump over there. And in the process of doing that, you come across a lot of different people who talk really well and you're magnetised to them. And just by virtue of being interested in the way they speak, you'll learn automatically. And like I say, you don't necessarily need to agree. So, I mean, I'm quite surprised at the different range of political viewpoints that I've been able to come to terms with that I might be able to have prejudiced in a way that actually wasn't rooted in anything but just prejudiced itself. Yeah, that comes out in your writing and your columns and your book. So, might come back to that because I think this idea of how you have a passport to life and in years being words and what is it for other people?  And we'll come on to poverty in a second, but before we do, you're very self-confessional. You're very autobiographical in all your writing. Does that come naturally? Is it easy? Do you... I mean, are you like that when you chant to people all the time?  Yeah, I guess it is a kind of just a personality trait in some ways. But I think it was something that I also kind of was conditioned to do in different ways. It's been the case up until very recently that I would only be afforded access to conversations and platforms to speak if I divulge to a certain level of personal lived experience. But also, I've found actually and the work that I've done throughout my life in communities, even when I, as a teenager, was working with the people that were trying to stop the gangfighting in my own community.  But actually, the things that I do require a lot more courage than joining a gang, you know? Like I was going into the community and asking the gangs that I went to school with. Why stop this crap? Do you know what I mean? Like, what are you doing this for? Why are you fighting all this? Look at it, it's derelict. And those things are harder to do. And so I found whenever I was trying to engage with people when you're trying to influence people's behaviour, you're trying to get people to self-reflect. You know, maybe it's people with drug problems, maybe it's people who are misbehaving in school. The process of them transcending their difficulties is contingent on them looking inside themselves. And thinking, is there anything within my competence that I can do either becoming aware of behaviour or attitudes that's holding me back or identifying some sort of support that I might need? And in order for them to do that, they have to be very open about what they're going through. And I find the quickest, most effective and most ethical way to produce that is for me to do the exact same thing. And this is something that I find interesting. People will often commend me on my honesty. But what I'm inferring from that is that they're dishonest. When people say to me, well, you're very honest, then I'm like, well, you seem to have a problem with being honest then. And it's interesting, isn't it? Cos in this world, everyone seems very sure about what's right and wrong. And everyone's on the soapbox constantly on social media about this and that next thing. And politicians are devising their next move based on the whole temperature of social media. But on social media, we all give one another a pass to be completely unauthentic every time we speak into the void. And it's quite frightening that people would take massive political decisions and calculations based on how people behave on social media because it's a completely fake persona that we're all constructing. So the fact that honesty is so effective means we've got a long way to go. And sometimes also, it's on a personal level, it's quite cathartic for me to talk about things and see how it impacts people. And that might not, you might not see that on a public level or on a public eye level. But the messages that I get from people, the people that come up to me and spend a wee bit longer talking to me when they're getting their book signed and sometimes they're quite emotional and they've got things that they need to tell me because they've been affected. And honesty's something people will only venture to do and take the risk down if they see it's being modelled to them. And I think honesty's a big part of wellbeing. It's a big part of social cohesion. It's a big part of us learning to live together. And I can't demand that other people from the world to do it first. Well, indeed, it's not just honesty. It's vulnerability too. And yet in your book you talk about the stress of being vulnerable all the time and the stress of making sure you're not vulnerable. So I'm sort of taking it back by how open you are and therefore exposed and open to the time. That's quite an insightful remark, actually, because recently I've been struggling in my personal life, partly because as much as I was working hard because I thought I had a chance of making it as a writer or making it as something, what's actually happened is really what I was foreseen, the scale of it, how quickly it happened. So I wasn't really prepared for it. I mean, just right now, I'm sitting here and I know I'm here and I know on some level I've earned it, whatever it is, but on another level I'm completely detached from what's going on here because I'm always sitting at home shouting at this room and telling the people that work here to stop applauding themselves. So that comes with a certain level of stress and exhaustion. I've got young kids, there's all these different relationships in my life that need to be maintained. There's a certain level of pressure now as a breadwinner to provide a certain quality of life for my children. And then I look out onto social media and the most important issue of the day changes every day, but there's a part of my subconscious that's like I want to know what the most important issue is and I'm going to really engage with it and sometimes the issues that come up are things that directly impact me or challenge me, particularly things like the me too moment that we're in and I remember the moment that it dawned on me that what I felt we were being asked to do as men was not necessarily paraphrase the things that feminists say on Twitter and sort of put it out there that were terribly woke but to actually look in the mirror and think, OK, so if masculinity can be toxic and it's everywhere to the extent that even women are blind to it sometimes, then surely that must mean that I must already have been guilty of some of this stuff before in my life, whether it was a ludd remark, whether it was some sort of sexist comment or whether it was something else that maybe is a bit more serious and so that was immediately what I instinctively knew I should do but the problem is I was looking to social media for tips on how to go about that and as we all know even within communities that have largely aligned and agree there are all sorts of different takes on what men should do how men should respond and actually it created not to say this is really difficult for men too that is absolutely not what I'm saying someone out there will interpret it as that though and that's part of the vulnerability but actually it forced me to kind of reflect almost morbidly and look for things that weren't there cos I go really deep with this stuff and I'm very kind of like rigorous with it and I found that even when I would write about the experience there's always something you're going to write no matter what your intention is that's going to upset someone and I thought you know what but I'm just going to swallow that and suck it up cos that's the moment we're in and men with a platform need to show a bit of leadership I'm not saying I'm special I'm just saying like it's about being honest with ourselves and also being kind to ourselves you know where we need to be and so that's a funny thing I didn't expect that was more mentally challenging and taxing and emotionally kind of frightening than I thought it would have been but I'm happy that I've done that and just sort of went through that journey and I don't know any I'm assuming there's other people out there who have felt the same things that's a natural moment that's so all-encompassing and affect you specifically I mean think about all the parents out there that used to smack their kids thinking it was okay now it's illegal so some of them are in this room and alive right now and they're living on a fault line I hope if they're in this room they're alive can I just say that Hi, good point and sorry to go on a bit but it's that idea of living in a time where an ethical norm changes so dramatically that behaviour that you thought was innocent and innocuous and even jovial is actually dangerous, frightening or even criminal and it just changes like that and we're all going to be on a fault line one day it doesn't matter how woke you are one day you're going to find out something that you're doing right now something that you're thinking right now is suddenly out of bounds and you're going to see people writing about it in social media and you're going to feel very threatened and challenged and frightened and then that's when safe spaces don't seem like such a daft idea because you're going to need to go and talk to somebody about it if you're like me and you're brought up in the 70s you thank your stars that you're not in prison these days I can tell you that so it's a oh no laughter there that was a joke by the way okay just in case but that's this sort of too many people in the 70s here they're making a filter that people have now because of social media so they screen something before they react to it because they're like I don't know if this is a socially sanctioned reaction that I'm supposed to have but then we're all having a debate you really feel better we're not laughing at my jokes but we're all having a debate with a certain level of inauthenticity because we're all frightened of being shamed or saying the wrong thing and it doesn't matter where on the spectrum we are we all feel that within some community and I think we need to move beyond that in some way recognising that restorative justice and compassion are as important and that fear and shame are corrosive and toxic if they're untreated and actually lead to people making some really weird political decisions if they're sitting with that stuff they're like oh hello Mr Peterson you know on Google we're a long way from that so you don't know how Mr Peterson is do you? no I'm not no Shuvanno either can you say many of us have the self-honesty or even you obviously have to answer all these questions yourself and get to the truth whereas I think most of us don't I think most of us just accept that we've got these values we don't think they're values but they're just prejudices maybe can I move because you've brought up so many other issues about masculinity and others but can I just start off on poverty though because I think perhaps not my generation but my parents generation for example they think of poverty in particular as as hunger as material poverty I mean they're more sophisticated than that but the point is they recognise poverty in real terms in terms of a roof over your head food on the table and so on but when you talk about poverty in your book and in your writing generally the thing you identify is not the material possessions at all it's the stress and that's the key for you for poverty do you want to just expand on that because after that it's a it's a great analysis of of why poverty is so why it keeps you down and I think and what what's quite striking is that to people who live in it it's the most obvious thing but it just shows you the disconnect between the people who often are in charge of the solutions and discussing them and the people who actually are in it because the minute I say to someone who grew up in a deprived community you know stress is the catalyst for a lot of these decisions that will happen in a lot of the direction of your life it's not to say that the social conditions aren't the chief activator of all of it they are but to understand some of the self-defeating behaviour the educational trajectories that people will take how families break down the likelihood that someone from a certain level of adversity will will die younger will go into the criminal justice system will experience more serious mental health difficulties when you look at that through a lens of stress it begins to join all the dots it's the connective tissue between all of these different things if you if you talk to anybody that's sitting on the streets of Scotland right now begging for money right regardless of whether they actually have somewhere to stay whether they're begging to just kind of top up their money whatever the background right the systems that are in place for them to become integrated back into sort of mainstream society where they might have access to benefits education employment and potentially prosperity that whole process is something many of them don't go on because just thinking about it's terrifying just thinking about it's stressful and and that's something that a lot of people find really hard to understand because they see it from if I was in that position I would be doing everything I could to get myself an address to get whatever benefit entitlement if I had to sit in the brew for eight hours one day I would do that and that's cool like that's of course but other people the stress response kicks in and it undermines whatever good intentions they have that day and the problem that we have just now is that we have a society particularly at UK level just now I have to say and I don't engage in all this Tory scum part I don't think that's cool scum is a very specific word for a very specific type of person where I come from so I don't throw that about however in Westminster just now I think the levels of privilege of the people in power is expressed in all of the terrible decisions that are being made regarding social policies whether it's universal credit whether it's the hostile environment policy at the home office and hostile environment policy at the home office is the doctrine underscoring all of it across all of public services so it's a deep belief if you're being charitable about this government and the belief that if you create conditions of hostility at the institutional level then people will just automatically self correct because they would rather go through a process of voluntary self correction than deal with a public institution that they're legally entitled to seek support from whether that be welfare whether that be immigration, home office and while I understand that tough love is necessary at certain points in our lives the idea that emotionally scarred people from adversity or even just people living in the stress of unworked poverty are going to do anything but hide from a letter from the DWP are going to do anything but be frightened when they pick up the phone I mean their life is scary enough why is the government trying to frighten them if a letter that comes through the door for any government department I just phoned up HMRC the other day volunteering to pay back money that I owe them because I can afford that and the way they spoke to me I didn't get involved in a crap but I knew that I was like man that's about that letter I got for the department I worked in pensions years ago when I get sanctioned because something in my family attempted suicide and I couldn't make an appointment it's reminding you at every stage if you put a foot wrong you're done and anything they do to help you you're not entitled to that help we're deciding to give you that help so not only are these social conditions harsh but we are making sure you do not forget that you should be very frightened at us it's just an emotionally illiterate way to conduct social policy I'm sorry if there's any Tories in here but it is even conservatives know it's too much they intuitively know it's too much but they just cannae get behind Corbyn and I understand that that's asking enough for all of us so just on that though just about the whole the difference between the stress that is poverty and material consumption you were on Twitter earlier today because you were challenged about these and nice TVs and so on just explain how you came back at that because you talk about this in some of your work my strategy is usually to accept that there's a grain of truth to the thing that the person is saying so in this case it was somebody saying how can they be poor if they've got tellies and material wealth on the surface and I simply said maybe it's to do with the culture of shame around poverty I still carry that shame I've felt ashamed ever since I was a kid and I don't know why and and I'm still very self conscious even earlier when I got heckled and the guy was saying I was talking for too long and I started thinking everybody on the panel thought of that as well and I pure just went into myself and just retreated and I felt a sense of shame so people who buy tellies at a bright house and bankrupt themselves and get into debt and they're doing that because they think if they do those things they conceal the poverty and thus have some sort of brief reprieve from the sense of shame not necessarily just the shame at the level of culture but also in their own communities where we very much are very harsh with one another and police one another in terms of what we wear and what we do and where we're going on holiday and the kind of dream of individualism and kind of like not just capitalism but a really intense all-encompassing capitalism where we see ourselves as an audience would see us all the time like we are the protagonists and our own screenplay and when you're living on the breadline that's a bit of a waste of your time it's very stressful though cos it's all encompassing and even if you intellectually know you shouldn't be doing these things the penalty is so high, socially to not have the things everyone else has so if people have an issue with that then the issue should be with the billions and billions that's invested in not just advertising but understanding the human mind and all the things that we're vulnerable to and how to get an idea in there and stuck in there imagine social services where as in true of as McDonald's in Coca-Cola good thinking but that whole idea of buying 90 pound trainers which does, you know the effect it has outside on maybe it's a class divide or maybe it's more than that but the idea of choice of having some sort of choice and spending money that you don't have on something that you can't afford and something that other people disapprove of that's a result of stress it's a result of social pressures a particular spending then you have the impulsivity and then you have a lack of concept of the value of money because you never have it so money's this thing that just comes and goes I mean I'm getting better at managing what money I have now and more responsible in the sense that I'll look to pay off debts if I come into some money but I still find it difficult to part with and I'm not kind of tight at anything like that in fact something that I'm too generous maybe some sort of guilt is it what we are but I find there's an impulsivity that creeps into my life before I recognise it I'm on the train with two burger kings and eating four toffee crisps and I've bought something on the phone and I've said something stupid online before I know it I'm like man I've got a real impulse control problem and if you look at a lot of the data around how stress and poverty affects people at the level of cognition then you'll find that actually impulse control is one of the things that's flagged up as being a kind of a variable open to many differences depending on the severity of the stress experienced to the point where I've seen psychiatrists have hypothesised that I might have some kind of personality disorder I just treat it with my recovery programme I just think it's me but I'm not recommending everybody to do that you might need other help you know but it's just a I could do one less label at this point but the the impulsivity and it's no making excuses right if I'm impulsive there's a certain kind of level of right I need to get a grip on this I need to understand when I'm stressed and I'm tired I'm likelier to forget that I don't want to eat chocolate and spending the night zoning out to the internet watching things that are bad for me so I need to build in some kind of like safety mechanism so that when I day eventually get tired which is inevitable there are some other options there for me that's personal responsibility looks like in my life but even then it doesn't mitigate the all-encompassing sensory obstacle course that people have to traverse regardless of what social class they come from it's just you can buy into a fancier sensory obstacle course do you know what I mean if you've got a bit of cash so I'll definitely go back to individual responsibility it's one of the most interesting observations or directions you've taken yourself in and encouraging others to but before it comes to that you talk about you talk about the DSS and other agencies there in your book you're very direct about what you call the poverty industry so it's quite funny because you do the thing of recognising it and also feeling guilty because you recognise yourself, it's supported you and it still supports other people but it's a self continuing industry, it actually looks after its own and you're quite critical of it it doesn't actually raise people out of poverty it actually traps the minute yeah it's not necessarily because the organisations of the people working in them it's the system in which all of these things are couched so the current system that we have sees poverty not as something to eradicate but it's something that has to be managed so at some level we're accepting that this kind of form of social democracy one of the externalities is some people will always live in poverty so we have to create an infrastructure and an industry or kind of social architecture or whatever to deal with that and manage it and help people and some people might accept that as you know a decent moral position for a society considering we've enjoyed a lot of relative prosperity even people who live in poverty here have access mostly to some basic things like education that a lot of people in the past haven't had but at the same time the problem with certain aspects of the poverty industry but it's the term that a lot of people use in the community that I come from if they're using the polite term and in a way I've got to use those terms because I'm trying to reflect a bit of them back at them and really what I was saying actually is not controversial at grassroots level of these organisations it's not these are the things people know intuitively whether they're youth workers whether they work for local authorities whether they work for third sector whatever they work for the people that are out there the nurses on the ward as my sponsor says they get it straight away they always try to communicate that stuff up the chain it's a wee bit further up where people get a bit salty about it and that's usually the case because I think when you become detached from what it is that you got into the thing that you do or to sort or to be involved in you don't perceive yourself as detached you see yourself as just becoming more effective at that job so the response that you're getting from the people you think you're helping is the opposite of what you want and what your intentions are and that's where the conflict comes in and actually as critical as I am I do line out in a lot of detail how you might go about trying to avoid setting up those conflicts and also recognising that there is a lot of goodwill out there and that you can't avoid people having to intervene in communities in some way but it's about being mindful of how it might be perceived when we do it and all are wee default tricks we fall back on when we get challenged about stuff that are really about us demonstrating authority and I don't want working class communities to be so skeptical of charities that they would be happy to see them on a page of the Sun newspaper every day getting ripped-ish reds I don't want that opinion to exist in working class communities I'll go into working class communities and challenge it but the only way I can challenge it is to say I spoke to people at Bernardo's they get it, they're working on it do you know what I mean but think of all this other stuff that they're doing working with these kids that have been abused working with this, that and the next thing and so it's just it's about being frank but also saying look I know you're trying to do the right thing here I appreciate actually how sorry I know my answers are long but they're no simple questions I recognise that it's inherently difficult to cross any kind of classed line or any line of identity whatsoever I get that and sometimes I'm on the receiving end of being challenged when I think I know what I'm talking about and I don't like it at first but I suck it up because sometimes we are the ones on the soapbox telling everybody how it is and other times we need to sit down and shut up you know I have to say I think you're quite good at challenging yourself and others I've got some more questions but just I'm just considering I'm paying attention to Darren put your hand up if you want to come in ask a question about that look at that they're all oh look at that okay okay well having said that I better take you in the microphone should come on right in front of you when you come in good evening I am interested in hearing what you think of I'm part of that poverty industry I work in policy and public affairs in Scotland and one of the things that we've been promoting my organisation is I'm not trying to lobby anyone here I just genuinely want to hear what you think of it is I'll try and keep it short I represent speech language therapists in Scotland and we've been looking at or trying to raise up this idea of the intergenerational cycle of communication disadvantage and all that that proset the system and being terrified of the interaction with the system and one of the great things that's happened in Scotland as a result of that is that in our social security welfare system now it is a duty to make sure that the agency, the directorate, the whole system is communication inclusive in that it's the ownership of the agency to make sure that it communicates in a way that works for the people that should be getting welfare and I just wonder what you from your perspective what you think of that idea I think it's a natural evolution based on clearly trying every other possible way and finding that it doesn't work and that's, I don't say that facetiously I just mean it's a natural that's how we find out what works I mean obviously if that I just mean if you knew that work ten years ago you would have done it then so there's something about the way that we figure things out as a society institutions, communities, individuals where we try things again and again it might solve some problems and then we hit a wall and the wall a lot of the time in communities and individuals lives is that the systems only set up to take a certain kind of incoming call I think actually my younger brother I've got two young brothers one of them's in prison just now classic tale of someone who becomes socially excluded grew up didn't have any connection really to his parents bereavement he said residential instability I've only really known him for the last three years and still find it difficult to connect and he tells me these stories about going to talk to people about getting a flat and going to talk to people that are meant to help and social working all that and his thing he doesn't realise this is what he's communicating to me but I get it his thing is he gets dead flustered cos he can't communicate and the person that he's dealing with is making value judgments on how he's expressing that now aye he can't allow somebody to be aggressive or threatening and I think you have to be very clear when someone is being racist for example say somebody's in mourning about no getting a house and they're blaming the Roma community or something for it right but at the same time there has to be a certain degree of flexibility and recognition of where that person is and what do we ultimately want do we want them leaving the room and never coming back again to put co-signing or the crap to say like park that from the room and just deal with the issue here and I think that's what you're trying to produce is that sort of result and actually the more that we walk alongside people even when they are being a bit abrasive and offensive and even vulgar we learn so much more we become more intuitive to how to manage a situation like that and we start to see some of the nuance in what at first might just seem like a total onslaught a challenging behaviour and it means that even if it doesn't work out with that particular person we can take all that experience bank it and bring it into the next interaction, spread the word you know share the experiences with other people and I think that that's when you're talking about services getting really intuitive or trying to get more intuitive they're recognising it's about the rapport you need to create a rapport with someone before they will move the way that society needs them to move to get them back and I hope that I answered your question in some way or if it didn't I'm really sorry I tried my best can I ask you? You're saying it in a different way but it feels like what we're talking about rings true to you some more questions going up here as well but let's come back in a second can I just ask you before we do about this idea of individual responsibility you know if you've you say in your book and you talk about this in your writing about identifying with the politics of the left generally but you're quite critical of the left and in particular this idea that we are all individually responsible for our actions or you have to accept some individual responsibility now that that will make intuitive sense to a lot of people but politically it's quite a dangerous philosophy to espouse because it is often seen as a right wing position to have I think it's quite funny how people who would consider themselves radical won't acknowledge some aspect of reality that's not offensive to most people that's strange isn't it and that's a problem I find on the left and I'm sure the left finds lots of problems in me but actually I'm just expressing something I'm just expressing what the word does in the community itself I mean it's not most people are not naturally just inclined to blame systemic issues for all their issues that they're dealing with I mean they intuitively understand they're always getting shafted on some level they get that there's a sort of kind of acceptance of it not because they're being servile but because they recognise I need to get on with my life I need to work, I've got a family could it be worse, could it be born with dark ages do you know what I mean and sometimes that could be quite a healthy way to look at it where you've got a lot of people on the left saying this is the dark ages and you've got a lot of people in communities like hold on a minute when it comes to responsibility I'm simply making the argument that that people transcend difficulty when they become willing to engage with whatever support is out there and that that is an act of marshalling yourself will you can't you could lay on the most intuitive service ever right and see if someone doesn't buy into it pointless so it's like how do you create that moment where the rapport's there so that you can go and look them in the eyes so we've been working together for a while now and you're doing good but see the day you're going to have to do the heavy lifting with this and I'm going to be here the whole way with you that's what personal responsibility looks like it's it's someone acknowledging whatever scale that is in their life it might be someone deciding not to run into the pub when a letter for the DWP comes through the door that's an act of personal responsibility because you've been down that road you know where that ends so you're telling me that you need a service to deal with that moment or can we just deal with it in this conversation because you know intuitively that the only way you're going to deal with your problem is no going to the pub the day so the day that's what personal responsibility looks like for somebody else it might be going to a meeting with someone a sponsor phoning when they're thinking about using these are all acts of self-will personal responsibility trial and error that incrementally improve the conditions of somebody's life I'm not saying that mitigates neoliberal economics I'm not saying that it's going to solve the Israel Palestine problem or climate change I'm saying I've got to go into communities and write a book and punt a book that somebody can actually use right now no waiting until Jeremy Corbyn kills their off-childs that's not in the manifesto yet by the way do you know what I mean though I don't mean to be facetious I would probably love to redact what I just said there however I was just trying to make a point that sometimes on the left we have this hypothetical crash moment where suddenly a new society will come into view and I understand that the society that we're in in many ways has shown serious signs of wear and tear but I don't think it makes any sense to go into communities and say there's literally nothing you can do the day there's nothing you can do the day nothing the world is just the way it is and you are screwed the only thing you can do is vote for me do you know what I mean I mean as an idea it's been around and it used to be a left-wing idea as much as anybody else is but it's eroded and it became politically it's been seen as certainly the argument of lift yourself up by your bootstraps has been captured by the right co-opted by thatcherism on the loaded term I'm saying this I didn't let violent bullies in school tell me what words I couldn't use so I'm not going to let a bunch of left-wing academics tell me that I can't say the word personal responsibility when that's exactly what I mean very good there's hands going up everywhere right lady with the glasses there and then there's two ladies right here hi I don't know if you saw question time last night but it was really good to hear someone from the audience talking about the serious drug abuse issues here in Scotland and I just wanted to ask your views on it we are up the back there you there hi so personally I've experienced a great deal of loss within my own family with drug abuse and I feel very strongly that there's not enough being done to save young people I hear what you're saying about taking self-responsibility but we have to look at the total lack of rehabilitation centres in Scotland there's one just outside Edinburgh of Peoples that costs £12 grand to go to that 12 step sort of programme and the millions of pounds that have been spent on methadone which is slowly killing our younger generation I know that you've been a user in the past so have I we're looking quite healthy but what about the future of younger people that are coming up totally and I think you make a really valid point about making sure that you get the balance between encouraging self-efficacy and agency whatever there's potential for somebody to say you know what the day I think I can manage this and also that then being an excuse or what currently here you know let's encourage children to become more resilient so we don't have to have that difficult conversation with Amazon you know and I think when we're talking about personal responsibility I tend to be of the mind that before you tell somebody to take responsibility for an issue you have to really understand intimately what it is you're asking that specific individual to take responsibility for and that's why I always talk about walking alongside people in communities now on the point about services drug addicts like very most vulnerable disenfranchised politically disenfranchised groups they're the easiest ones to cut the money to homeless drug addicts certain groups it's certainly ethnic groups generally because they have no advocacy really they have no political representation so while drug policy, drug rehabilitation drug legalisation might be an issue that a politician in this room will speak on when it's in the news agenda it's not a hobby horse really for a great deal of people it's not the thing they're coming in here and battering on about every day until everybody's like oh here comes you know meffa don't marry you know what I mean shut up about the meff script and because that's where the pressure comes in that's where we come in I took part in the recovery walk a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago in Glasgow spoke quite frankly actually broke one of the traditions of the fellowship that I'm in because I said we need to engage in controversy one of the traditions of the recovery fellowships is that we don't engage in controversy we don't endorse or oppose political causes you can't deal with addiction on this kind of industrial scale without getting political without saying something that's going to offend people in government, in addiction and in recovery and I think actually in Dundee the problem is so severe that people are going to start getting angry enough that politicians will become very intuitive to what they're saying suddenly it's just a shame you need to kind of lose your ag for that to happen particularly in communities where emotional stress is a catalyst for so many problems but it's difficult and I think you're right to kind of call me on being careful about how I deploy the personal responsibility stuff it's important that I always qualify exactly what I mean with that and congratulations on your recovery and thank for your question I'll take the two ladies here the one behind you first and then the one on the front row thanks very much I'm a secondary school teacher in a pride prived part of the country and serving a community very much like the one that you talk about in your book and when I read your book a lot of it spoke to me in terms of the things that our young people are going through about the kind of political drive just now and indeed Nicola Sturgeon has kind of taken her reputation on it to close the attainment gap in education and so as teachers and I'm working in an attainment challenge school which has been given a lot of extra money by the government but as teachers we are charged with closing the attainment gap so getting kids in poverty better results you know better life chances which I guess we're all in education for however I wonder what your view is on how easy that is for someone in an educational perspective to do without all the joined up thinking all around it thank you I've been visiting a lot of schools I still do a lot of public events and all that I go into schools and meet people so as much as I'm quite distant from my own education experience I'm always updating my understanding and what I feel about the whole conversation around attainment is that the focus is wrong because one of the reasons a certain type of child won't manage in a mainstream classroom is because they lack a certain quality of emotional attainment there's a certain lack of emotional literacy certain things aren't being modelled to them at home perhaps because of the stress a family is dealing with and they're coming into a school and into a society to be fair that's relying on very specific social cues and incentives to influence their behaviour but when you experience adversity to the extent of a lot of the kids that you have seen up close then you'll already know that that actually means that it sets you up to incentives and social cues because your whole system of assessing what's going on around you is programmed for a hostile environment which means you will very successfully navigate adversity and hostility and to some extent a child like that is very socially sophisticated but not in the way that's recognised by the curriculum and the minute that they come into an atmosphere that is not hostile they don't know how to function they're anticipating the conflict the retribution they're anticipating the shame I was hearing a story yesterday a children book festival where a woman was talking about how on one side she had parents who resented the fact that their kids were learning to read and on the other side a school that had taken an adversarial stance on spoken word poetry and these were the things that she was trying to do to keep these kids in the game somehow just to keep some kind of connection not even about the poetry it's about the rapport so what are they uniting around to create the rapport the activity is almost irrelevant and she's getting it at every angle so emotional attainment children will become likelier to learn and to believe they can learn and believe that when things get tough they can keep going once they have a certain emotional belief that how they feel in that moment while it seems very intense in their head racing that that moment will pass and they'll get better at managing that stuff there's so many things a school needs to do now I can sympathise with teachers but our society is changing and that's the first place a kid goes really to get a sense of the society that they live in other than their own home so if we need to radically rethink what a school can offer then that's what we'll have to do Can I just say about that as well politicians will often turn to education because if you're concerned about social mobility education for so many years in the past when we had social mobility education was the route to social mobility that was the way to improve yourself and get on, do anything and we've lost social mobility I think that you've brought it out yourself it's fossilised, it's very very difficult now for people to change the circumstances into which they're born but we still look to education today we're looking to the wrong place now No One of the reasons actually that people will not become as socially mobile as they otherwise might like or society might like is because the current curriculum by the time someone actually gets through it and gets their qualification it's kind of out of sync with the economy that they're entering I mean I remember that I got a computing qualification you know what I mean wasn't the only sort of computer that we use these days teachers told me I better stop using a calculator because it's no ziff I would ever be walking around and be one in my pocket everywhere I went early retirement for that teacher I think and so we've not just got a curriculum where people are being trained to enter an economy where actually what they're really saying is you're going to need to train with three or four times your career is going to change all the time because of automation and big data but also that within that there's no there's no like how are you going to live how are you going to be in this society there's no recognition that's really difficult like let's educate you on how the hell you're going to bloody manage because this is a shit storm out here mate it's just that time I've swore in parliament today I'm feeling great good about myself I'm not sitting in that chair you're okay so I just I feel that the curriculum I mean look at sorry but look at some of the big problems we're experiencing right now people are always talking about the tribalism aren't they they're always talking about the quality of debate doesn't matter where you're in the spectrum you always wish somebody else would just be a bit more civil in a debate people don't even get the chance to debate unless they get to like second year in university the whole idea of this course is like esoteric in education so people are just navigating everything intuitively based on all the prejudices they've inherited their personal bias whose face they think is annoying on the telly you know like you'd be surprised the sort of political wormholes you'll go down because you find somebody's face annoying you know it's so true though and like in school in school doesn't he mention of this is the environment you're actually going to enter rather than this kind of one we think might exist here are the skills you're actually going to need to have here's what diversity of opinion means so you don't freak out and think the world's ending cause somebody said something that you don't agree with and you feel a bit faint like let's teach that in school as well as the other stuff cos these are skills people need to learn and I think they need to learn them pretty young so may I pressure on you go go yesterday I attended a theatre performance at the young offenders institution in polemont and afterwards I had an opportunity to talk to one of the more senior correctional officers about what kind of art programs worked and the first thing he said was Loki he said that you gave them the vehicle to really address their issues and so what I'm interested to hear more from you is what is it you think that you did that worked what did you walk away from that experience I'm glad you asked me that I've been a while since I've done a job like that but that was my kind of trade for many years and going into a prison environment where young offenders it's not an easy thing for anyone to do at least of all for them and they've got no choice so I levity is the first thing being alright to have a laugh no take it too serious but I'll share with you this experience I wrote in the last book about working with women in the prison and the reason I wrote about that specifically was because I felt that their experiences mirrored my mothers a wee bit in the sense that they'd experienced abuse earlier in their life and then this had found expression later on as their own because they were transmitting aggression and the things that they had experienced but it was another thing I didn't write in the book and one time I was doing this project it was a six week thing using rap as a way to engage young men who have all perpetrated violent crimes and for me rap, crime, hip-hop was my first letter of experience and for a lot of these kids that's the same and the culture people create of Scotland might not recognise the validity of that yet although some of them are working really hard on it but it is the case that that'll be the first piece of art that they'll identify with that they'll be breaking down in very much a kind of way that someone would critically analyse poetry they're recognising themes callbacks and structure they're recognising tone they're feeling something and so when I went in I was like that was my whole gambit was recognising it doesn't matter what song you're listening to and what I personally think of it you're having a letter of experience and I'm going to deal with you at that level that you're operating with a sophistication that's not being assumed because you're in here when I actually got there though they've always got a wee spanner on the works for you so this wee guy was ready to rap battle me right so here's how I intuitively navigated that situation I got there first thing, such and such wants to battle you straight away I know if I back down for a challenge in that environment then I'll lose my status immediately in the eyes of all these men that's how toxic masculinity works the problem is if you want to affect men perpetrating toxic masculinity you need to understand toxic masculinity like it was a language you need to really know it and sometimes you need to use it to navigate and negotiate entry into that community so that you can become somebody that can influence their behaviour and that's controversial because it looks like you're cosigning other people crap anyway I did my own thing so I'm like I'll park it, I'll say maybe I'll date later so I'm leaving it open so they've no decided that I'm a shape bag I'm a game, I'm mysterious in their eyes so I get their attention straight away I'm in there I'm right in there, I'm just doing the jump rap about the jump that's a way for me to send loads and loads of signals that I come through their kind of background that was only just by chance that I didn't end up getting the jail myself and then they keep going on about the rap battle though and then they have to date because the risk is this a day of the battle a lose this other boy becomes the alpha and the group which is not a situation that you want as a tutor and a learning environment or a really really day of the battle and if I really day of the battle I'm hurting somebody's feelings and that presents a risk of disengaging the group of offending the group or of violence so I'm explaining all that like I sat for tours and thought about it I did all that intuitively I was like of course I'll battle you when do you want to date and here go and they came up and they done it and I had to rip him in front of his own pals and I had to date in a language they understood that would be extremely inappropriate and vulgar and pretty much every other context in this society but that's why that project worked and that's why that guy even though I've not been there for three years brought my name up because that's the sort of work that you really need today you need to put your stuff on the line so to speak and you need to trust your instincts and then even if you make a mistake you'll understand why you made a mistake but I recognise that it's not a conventional way to work he's not conventional people if Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson start going head to head in a rap battle next week and I'll I'll know you've influenced them there's a lot of very good you've had more reaction social media than all the other guests put together so I'm not surprised really see that frightens me a wee bit the positivity is the word I'm getting here but before I I've got quite a lot of specific policy questions which I'm surprised at but before I do that just on the same lines as you were taking there you have said quite often when you're challenged you talk about this when you're young and you've grown up that the response to anger is anger and the response to violence is violence and you've tried to break that cycle and politically you recognise it as well if people challenge you politically one of the best stories is how you came and put the title of the book Poverty Safari in your relationship with Ellie Harrison and your response I don't know if you want to just either tell that story or just tell us why that's your instinctive reaction so somebody has a go at you and you go right back and why we have to overcome that all of us have to overcome that I was conditioned for conflict with the environment that I grew up in and my way of my way of advancing in a conflict was no necessarily the physical stuff I didn't find myself having a natural gift for the fighting although I would fight I would defend my chances sometimes it was usually boys that were much bigger than me cos the only thing that the tough guys are scared of is a smart person so you're always coming into conflict cos you're always having to stone your gun in some way so being kind of quick off the draw being able to get in there with a response that regardless of how tough you are you're going home today thinking about what I said to you in front of everybody doesn't it matter if you batter me it's going to be slow painful for you so I used to pride myself in that that was me sharpening my talons and a quick wittedness came natural in that way and sometimes I would even foresee conflicts so why when I get into debates I'm very quick with the responses cos sometimes I foresee the debate so I prepare the response and just leave it somewhere it's a bit worrying actually but I just always want to be ready and when it comes to early harrassing then that was an example of that instinct completely much firing completely much firing and me having to have a hard look at what are my motivations what are my intentions what is informing my desire to lash out at someone I wasn't necessarily that mean to her or mean about her but I made some comments that in the context moan head I knew what I meant but when they get on social media then they could be interpreted as anything from cruel to deeply misogynistic just for those who don't know Ellie Harrison was an artist who was going to spend a year in Glasgow living in Glasgow she got 15 grand off creative Scotland to do a kind of action research project so her plan was to stay in one area of Glasgow and investigate could a freelance artist dedicate all their time to one community without having to travel all the country to make a living but she didn't communicate that very effectively in the beginning so that's where she was at fault and you called it a poverty safari and then I kind of I didn't realise there was this massive backlash also brewing and I kind of became a sort of lightning rod for some of it and a lot of people were very vile and using what was legitimate anger as a way just to be really cruel and nasty about someone so anyway once I came to and I realised actually maybe some of the things I've said have not been helpful then I sat and thought about it and realised because of my commitment to class politics and my belief in this idea of punching up this thing that people on the left sometimes will say to justify doing anything to anyone because they see everything in power dynamics so Ellie Harrison's nothing she's just middle class and when I punch her up in my head I'm punching the whole class system but it's a bit different when you have to get in the room with that person and you can see them their friends hugging them as if someone's died and you can see them sobbing and you realise that she's been through something that I would go through a couple of times after that myself and really be able to empathise and I just thought I still get emotional talking about it because it's an example of how sometimes your mind will present with a very compelling feeling that you are completely right and completely justified and in that moment you couldn't be more wrong you couldn't and I've just had examples of this so many times that that now I try to watch myself from launching into things like that cos actually what motivated me to do that wasn't class politics I was jealous that Creative Scotland was giving her money when I've not even got the balls to fill out an application form for Creative Scotland cos I feel like Creative Scotland's not for people like me and so I was just like get it right up the lot of yous and just saw it as an example I was like and using that as a veil really to conceal my own resentment my own inadequacies and and that was I thought that that was important to write about cos what I was really trying to do was make a point about this call out culture that we see was sometimes it's very legitimate see if you're going after a tax avoidant CEO a multinational company and he's using everything in his power to try and evade justice and hitting it with press releases and all sorts to try and create a false perception in the public mind call him out to see when it's some day actually in the community and you've known me sat down to talk to them to ask them what they're doing and you just go on social media and decide you've got to try and ruin their life or their career like maybe that's not the most efficient you see your energy and I see that for both sides now my door's open for anybody who wants to ask me any questions not many people change their mind publicly though which is well again it was when you're talking about call out culture you've got to get the recogniser's a legitimacy that it's a political historically successful political strategy to effect change but social media has completely changed the goalposts it means that you can just go after some that you personally don't like and say whatever you want behind an anonymous account and that person has to account for that regardless and I still experience some of that stuff myself so I try to conduct myself a bit better now we'll take some more questions a second I've got a couple here first is very specific one's about what changes would you make to the care system what changes would you make to youth work in particular another one's about universal credit there's three policy questions very specific as well well what are the care workers that I know are now working as part-time cleaners and taxi drivers and pretty much any other job they can get other than care because they're demoralised completely demoralised I mean I think everyone's feeling a wee bit tired and fed up with whatever they're working but I think in that area not only that but the additional insult of being regarded as an unskilled worker in some kind of way it makes no sense to me I mean people who would choose to go into that line of work or insult of the earth for me and there's unpaid carers as well obviously a lot of women and families are doing that women and my family are doing that I know that it's not necessarily privatised I know that there's a sort of one of these public private partnerships but I think pretty much every area where these sort of partnerships or that sort of model has tried produces unforeseen consequences I'm not saying that being just publicly rolled out and owned and publicly sorted out is going to make it perfect there's still going to be examples of people not getting the treatment issue, the people being sometimes mistreated wherever there are human beings these things are going to happen but I just don't like the idea of there being a profit motive attached to this kind of work because what's the incentive what is the incentive and if we don't get the incentive right then of course the thing's not going to work I'm not against business and people make money I just don't think you can incentivise companies to take care of people properly because it's thankless and unforgiving work and there's no a lot of money in it that's my view on that and a more topical universal credit it's obviously already in place for single claimants moments being rolled out in Glasgow I think pretty soon this week or maybe next week do you the benefit system generally do you have do you have the answer no no definitely don't have the answer no one has the answer no even one political party has the answer it's a complicated problem and so it requires a diversity of perspectives to really get to the root of it I think that universal credit could have been a great idea streamline the system remove the stigma attached to different kinds of benefits make it more simple use the internet technology so people can access it actually what's happened is that the government has just created another big cumbersome incompetent bureaucracy the only area where it's not incompetent is in the level of hostility and contempt and treat people with with these compliance meetings the welfare conditionality currently in the UK is becoming a human rights issue in fact I remember saying this when I was being auditioned for a previous episode of question time and I think they passed on me and I was just like oh this universal credit stuff might seem cool to know but see when they're all getting hauled out in front of human rights courts and all that and it's on somebody then we'll see then what the deal is universal credit is widely acknowledged as a failure the government are saving face they're relying on a certain level of confusion with an element to the public whether it's poor people, angry other poor people or whether it's people who've never had to access benefits who just resent the idea of someone getting something with no concept of why they're getting it or the humiliation a person has to go through to get the benefit in the first place and if you actually map the universal credit rollout on the communities it correlates in a very linear way with the explosion in food bank use so universal credit is driving homelessness residential instability mental health problems suicide and and it's a government institution that's supposed to help these people I mean of course if somebody's taking the mic be frank with them but if you're going to sanction somebody sanction them to go to a doctor because that's usually why people are messing about at the job centre because they've got issues addictions messed up families so if you're going to make them do something integrate health with welfare and send them down the hall their councillor or a doctor and say if you don't get to the boat with this problem then we'll stop your money but we're giving you a chance to go and sort it out I know that's not a solution but I would like to see Scotland in that if we can get a cop in every school in this country then why can't we have a child psychologist why can't we have a GP just integrate health with everything because we're just dealing with too many epidemics you know just there should just be a doctor down the hall wherever you work very good can I ask you, this is another one that's come up here in social media, an odd one I'd have said but I'm conscious of what you said in your book about this you were at a public meeting and you talked about I think you brought up President Trump well I've just been asked to bring up Brexit but Brexit and Trump it sounds like almost kind of like bulking violently bringing up Brexit it's like a kind of nastiest indigest you know but the interesting thing is that these things are at the heart of political discussion at the moment they're utterly dominating this Parliament and Westminster but does it have anything to do with solving poverty does it have anything to do with your life or the life of those around you I came to the view after a lot of thinking and conflict about it that the central problem of society just now is the wealth polarisation between the super wealthy and the political influence that this buys them and how they dominate politics everywhere they just do now we're in a stage where companies like Amazon Lockheed Martin Apple whatever Exxon mobile they are more financially powerful than governments than single nation states I'm not making an anti capitalist argument here I'm not going that far I'm simply saying the only way that you can rein that in is collectivising it at a national level which is why the EU just find Google 4 billion dollars right do you think Theresa May is going to find Google 4 billion dollars really and even currently do you think if Scotland is independent would we have the courage to do that and I'm no mocking whoever would be in government I recognise that is difficult because these companies are powerful but for me for all its flaws what the EU represents apart from sometimes being a total breeding ground for lobbyists also there's a conflict there because you've got other forces at work that are saying no Google you're getting it it doesn't matter send your lawyers like we're the EU do you know who we are and just pushing back and representing people's interests and I just don't see how Britain on its own is going to do that and for me that's the fundamental problem so if Farage is not talking about addressing that what's he talking about because that's what all the problems exoteers of varying degrees of grievance have the problems they're experiencing in their employment and their communities are worth bikes in the population create attitudes towards immigration it's all because of austerity that's an absolutely mandated thing to do in a world where big companies call the shots that's that there's one part of your book because you're quite interesting you defend people who voted for Brexit because because I like to make life hard for myself he said because people voted for Brexit and then the well-intentioned educated liberal middle class turned around and went oh my goodness who are these people and began savaging them and attacking them obviously people were right people are absolutely right to condemn racism any forms of xenophobia like I'm on board with that that's not even something that's up for debate with me but we run into problems when we start thinking in generalities because I'm not racist but I was thinking about voting leave it was just because I had that thought where I was like actually so you have to assume that a lot of people there were like that and were conflicted about it on some level now I recognise that a lot of the way that the Brexit campaign launched its message if you can call it that with queues of people of colour on the side of buses in the language, dehumanising language to describe them often they're fleeing war zones that are conflict zones precisely because of mistakes that we've made when we've intervened there I'm not blaming it all on us I know it's complicated but these are the things that these are the things that I would pin on people like Boris Johnson Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg who understand the complexity but undermine it and underplay it because they know if they can just marshal enough anger and create enough confusion then they will be granted the sort of political battering ram that gets them where they want to be which is that in any event they'll be able to exploit this for their own careers, businesses whatever it's an act of real and what I'll always I'll always not necessarily defend I've done a lot of work in additional needs schools where a high percentage of the people there have behavioural needs that they've got and behavioural problems and that's the sort of places where you see these racist xenophobic absolutely bonkers attitudes at a very very young age which tells me it's being inherited from someone else now that's a difficult thing to reconcile when we want to just see things in binaries but I'm dealing with children that have got really disturbing racist attitudes am I supposed to just condemn them cos it looks good on Twitter am I for the left that says somebody in jail for mugging people stealing motors, taking drugs or even drug dealing deserves to be at least understood for the social context in which their attitudes and criminality emerged and that I shouldn't be very I shouldn't just be wanting to jail them and be unforgiving and hug a hoodie and all that but then when it comes to this issue I'm just going to cast these kids aside and they'll try and understand what the hell is going on with you I can't do that I can't do it, I won't do it and anybody who thinks that you should have to there's no very much use in a real community where these issues are live it's easy to get on Twitter and say what you think is right now when you're faced and confronted with the reality of people who lead very complex lives who are navigating issues intuitively who always just feel like they're getting shafted then emotionally they come to a place and we all do it it just depends how socially acceptable your particular resentment is this morning I was in the coup and the old lady at the front of the coup was raiding through her purse since she's taken ages and in my head I'm hanking all these horrible hings about old people do you know what I mean it's just a kind of leap that I made I don't then, luckily there isn't a politician sitting there who's saying it's all the old people's fault do you know what I mean I know there are some and that's not me trying to explain a way or justify any sort of xenophobic or racist attitude it's just that these social conditions and the stress that some people are under and that feeling that they're not getting herbed they'll get exploited by genuine racists to kind of put the ear out and they're like I'll listen to you I'll listen to your concerns a lot of the grass roots left wing activists sorry they know this they're in the community dealing with the actual problems that give rise to xenophobia there are no grandstand on it they're dealing with housing rights they're dealing with tenancy rights they're dealing with zero hours contracts because that is the quantum mechanics of the populism deal with the issues you've got a safety valve everybody can calm down a wee bit and that's what they're in their game I don't even want to sound like that of course you would condemn racism that's the default position it's just that a lot of people get caught in the crossfire a lot of people haven't been educated they don't know how to talk they're reading certain newspapers where certain things fly that's how they talk does that mean that they just get discarded and forgotten about for all the member time or are they worth getting out and talking to and I'll always maintain the hope that people can change it's not a natural position to hate other human beings anybody ever seen a racist in yoga anybody ever seen a racist at a meditation class it's absolutely related to anger and resentment that just finds a political expression for a lot of people you know what I mean it's who can I blame who's fault is it let me apprehend as much reasoning as I can to justify this stupid assumption that I've made for some people obviously it's a bit more pathological than that well I do accept that okay the last question there's so many other things I wanted to ask you I promised I'd ask you about social media by the end of the time and it's a personal one again it's something you brought up in your own book which is that you might musically you might suffer from second album syndrome so you've come with a set of values and issues that you feel and you've lived personally but you're now in a different chapter in your life and you're getting more prosperous and you've got a young family and you're breaking the cycle yourself so will that actually stop you being able to talk about the very issues that you've been talking about you know as you get more removed from the very community that you came from that still came from yeah obviously I've considered that every day which is why I tend to accept invitations to go all across the country to communities which is not necessarily that lucrative you know it's because I wanted it whether it's Levendale hospital the other day Cacoddy food bank a few months back I was back down there again last week talking to teachers all the time you know that's a large part of my diary very often the needy force me to take travel expenses and all that you know I just go because one I need to keep my head to the ground and understand what the issues are and how people are talking about the issues as well because when I write something I want it to reflect the community that I'm writing about not just a very dry here are the issues I want them to feel not necessarily that I'm agreeing with everything they think but that it's a real authentic reflection of what they're saying because I know that's part of the frustration and the isolation culturally is even when you're being discussed and your community's being discussed you somehow just feel absent from the conversation but I do recognise that my whatever success that I'm enjoying now does I'm going to change I'm not going to resist the change because I've been changing all my life what I will do is document it all and write and reflect on it because we always hear these I don't know how things are going to end up for me but if they keep going and while they're gone I'm not going to be living in Calderwood I'm going to need to move after I get new windies but we always hear the story of the person who came through the hard up bringing and then they made it and that was it we don't see all of the tiny microscopic concessions that they made incrementally to their basic integrity in order to become unrecognisable to the community where they originated there's just no way that people who grew up in a scheme and then made millions of pounds can legitimately say I still know what it's like in a scheme but you don't see anybody writing about what it's like to change I mean what are all the temptations what's it like for me I've travelled first class a few times now and I'm booking a ticket and looking on my shoulders if somebody's got to see me and it's like natural for me to want to travel in comfort it's natural for anybody to want to travel in comfort and be able to open a packet of monster munch and not elbow someone in the face but I worry about the day where I get to the point that I'm no conflicted about it the day that I forget that the majority of the train are all just sitting like the set of children of men you know what I mean and there's dugs and wanes greeting and suitcases everywhere and just open tins and just anarchy you know what I mean and I don't want any day to come where I get on the train and I forget what that's like but I know that that might happen and I'll just write honestly as I continue to go I'm sure you will Dan, can I just say thank you very much what a fantastic discussion it's been a real pleasure can I thank you first of all actually our audience thank you for giving up your time this evening coming in joining us and for the participation it's a real pleasure, there's more events tomorrow particularly want to say Dan is going to be signing copies of his book poverty safari down in the lobby in a few moments but can I ask you to join me in thanking Dan McGarvey


During the past decade, a wide range of symptoms have been reportedly triggered by exposure to the radiofrequency electromagnetic field that emanate from cell phones during use, including headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue. The news media has promoted this as a new medical condition called electro-sensitivity, or electromagnetic hypersensitivity. These stories have been driven in part by people who claim to have detected a clear link between their own poor health and exposure to a specific electrical device, which can have major implications for a person's quality of life and health and stress, not to mention problems at the job or social situations. To see how common this was, they sat college students down on two big electromagnetic coils, and then went through a symptom checklist asking how they felt under both strong and weak electromagnetic field conditions, and they did report neurological symptoms, headaches, drowsiness, dizziness, fatigue, and irritability, visceral symptoms such as palpitations, muscle tension, nausea, though more under the weak field condition, abdominal pain, shortness of breath, and a little heartburn. They could feel it in their skin, crawly, cold, sweaty, itchy feelings, in their sensory organs registered blurred vision, ringing in their ears, dry mouth, a little stuffy, along with some other symptoms. 40 students and all asked to rate the symptoms during the sham, weak, and strong exposures, but in reality it was all a sham. They weren't blasted with any field period. The coils seemed to be connected to an impressive electric power supply with colored lights and everything, but it wasn't even really connected to anything under any of the conditions. The study was titled Polluted Places or Polluted Mind, suggesting that those who claim to be experiencing these symptoms may just be diluting themselves. Before jumping to conclusions, though, you want to study people who actually suffer from the disorder. 20 men and women who claim they were sensitive to cell phones were put to the test. They reported a variety of symptoms upon exposure to cell phone radiation, all sorts of pains and sensations, dizziness, breathing difficulties. So researchers sat them down in the chair with various active cell phones strapped near their head, and boy could they feel them, experiencing a variety of symptoms, but ironically they felt a bit worse with just like a beanbag dummy phone next to their head. Contrary to definite expectations, none of the so-called electro-sensitive could even distinguish whether the cell phones were turned on or off. And that's what nearly all such studies have found no evidence, that the symptoms are anything but psychological in nature. Noting that those who claim such hypersensitivity tend to exhibit more obsessive-compulsive, hostile, phobic, paranoid traits, and so they changed the name. What used to be called electromagnetic hypersensitivity in the medical literature is now called idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields, an acronym that sounds like something straight out of old McDonald's farm. Despite the conviction of IEIMF sufferers that their symptoms are triggered by exposure to magnetic fields, repeated experiments have been unable to replicate this phenomenon under controlled conditions. And we're talking 46 studies involving more than 1,000 people who say they have it, but when put to the test, when you put all the studies together, not only did they find no significant impact on any of the symptoms, there was no evidence that subjects were even able to detect the fields. Not a single person ever? Well, there was this one study in which two participants showed extraordinary performance, guessing when the cell phone was on up to 97 times out of 100. I mean, if that was just chance, that would be like the odds of being struck by lightning four times in a single year. But they failed to replicate the result a month later. And in science, if it can't replicate something, it doesn't exist. So why does this notion of hypersensitivity persist? Well, there is now an entire industry profiting off various gizmos claiming to protect people, and the media seems to love the hypersensitivity story. Yet why don't journalists mention the data? The media has tended to claim research in this area has been neglected, but the research has been done. Dozens of study that appeared have been systematically ignored by almost every single journalist covering the issue. Blind provocation studies published in the peer-reviewed academic literature and they're almost all negative. I mean, you could argue the evidence is nearly unanimous. So why doesn't the media even mention the data? Perhaps they'd leave it out on purpose, perhaps they're just incompetent and never looked it up, or maybe they're just suckered in by the snake oil salesmen selling insulating paint and like protective beekeeper hats. Not only do these lobbyists also conveniently failed to mention the dozens of studies, they viciously attack anyone who even dares to mention the data, accusing them of denying the reality of people's symptoms. No, no one's saying they're making them up. The science just suggests whatever the symptoms, the cell phones don't appear to be the cause. And hey, look, if you want to go there, one could just as fairly argue that those who are trying to sell these poor people a bill of goods are themselves hindering better understanding of their customers' suffering.