Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars

Far from his birthplace of Glasgow’s Pollok, Darren finds himself in the stately home of Lauriston Castle in Edinburgh. Beginning with a linguist examining Darren’s accent, this journey quickly spirals out into an authored examination of the impact of social class today and Darren’s own identity crisis. Along the way, Darren tries his hand at Scotland’s ‘secret’ sport, cricket, meeting two diverse teams in Inverness who are doing what they can to remove the image of cucumber sandwiches He nearly comes to blows with a butler who tells him to get his hands out his pockets, and over a game of croquet, Darren begins to realise he has much in common with the upper classes. Later he sits with a voice coach as she helps clients 'posh up' or even change their accents, before meeting some people from a 1950s cohort study in Aberdeen that is now being used to examine how people move between social classes. Ending his tour with a researcher who has been examining marriage between the classes over the last 50 years, Darren begins to wonder if his own marriage might just have had unintended consequences.

Starting off in Logie Estate in Dundee, Scotland’s oldest housing scheme, Darren discovers that our social class and where we live has a massive effect on our destinies. Meeting a group of gambling addicts, Darren begins to see how the desire to be a certain class had massive implications. In Glasgow, he meets Erin, an inspiring teenager who helped force the government to change their policy on how exam grades were awarded during the pandemic, and he comes face to face with two former offenders to find out if there is a link between knife crime and social class. He also discovers the hidden truth of one of our big employers - call centres. Not content with seeing how life on the urban streets is impacted, Darren then sets his steely gaze on one of the most contested issues in the debate about social class and power: rural land ownership. Starting in Langholm in Dumfries and Galloway, he meets some locals trying to buy 10,000 acres from one of the UK’s largest landowners, hoping to reverse years of decline in the town. Shotgun in hand, Darren is at an Angus country estate for a grouse shoot, only to discover that the answer to land inequality might not be as simple as he once thought.

As Darren examines the power imbalance which lies at the heart of social class, he begins to question whether the system is rigged. Just who has the power? Meeting a living history buff, he finds out how class was first militarised by the Roman Army – a legacy which carries through today in the British Army. Returning to his Pollok birthplace, he meets two anti-poll tax aristocrats who fought Margaret Thatcher's government over their policy, and travels to Inverclyde to witness a community battling rampant health inequalities and the legacy of the coronavirus pandemic. Setting his sights on the workplace, Darren discusses the worrying increase in suicide and meets a campaign group trying to challenge the seemingly unstoppable rise of zero-hours contracts.

As Darren examines social class, he begins to wonder if we can ever overthrow the legacy it continues to exert over our lives today. In this episode, Darren examines his own social mobility. Can he ever fully transition from his working-class past to the middle-class present he currently enjoys? Why should it matter where he is from? And why does his past continue to impact his present? Using an experiment conceived by Yale University in America, Darren tests the theory that you can recognise a person’s social class by just seven words, visits the further education college he once attended to give a masterclass, and returns to ‘his’ stately home, Lauriston Castle in Edinburgh, to compare his two worlds.