Pat Kane: The struggles of class are internal as well as external

The questions tumble over themselves, as Loki’s intelligent and kindly explorations turfs them up. For example, why hang on to the identity of coming out of a working-class background, when those in that background were often striving to erase its markers, and you are now irreversibly far-off and somewhere else?

Or how much of class is about cultural capital, as much as financial or economic capital: the advantage that comes from being able to make subtle distinctions of taste, fashion, references to knowledge?

Or, in an era where tiny percentages of the super-rich are pulling away from everywhere else, might a new, more multitudinous class be forming, which defends societies and the planet against its befoulment by heedless elites?

It promises to be a good show (I’ve had access to episode one) if it can trigger all this musing. As a way into Class Wars, I have to first react to a scene which literally resonates over nearly a century – matching my own family’s struggles to manage its class identity.

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Cleverly, the interviewees in the first episode mostly come to meet McGarvey in the grounds of Lauriston Castle in Edinburgh. (There are funny cosplay sequences where Darren adjusts his tweedy plus-fours before an observant butler, and plays croquet with the haute-bourgeois columnist Hugo Rifkind).

We end up in one of the Lauriston’s elegant drawing rooms, which Darren is already enjoying for its luxury (“This is all about rinsing the absolute most out of every moment in life, living it to the max,” he laughs).

In the room sits Kirsty the elocution teacher, along with Amanda, a mum from Glasgow’s Red Road Flats. With plastic contraptions in both their mouths, Kirsty is trying to soften Amanda’s Glaswegian glottal stops (Amanda thinks this will help her in job interviews).

Darren has already been sensitized to his own speech patterns. At the start of the show, a Glasgow Uni socio-linguist has pointed out how the rapper unconsciously makes his “T”s more pronounced, when he wants to make an important point (“pover-TEE, responsibili-TEE”).

McGarvey wonders if etiquette and training like this can “hack people’s perception of class identities”. But whether it’s about hacking or not, I am here to report that this ambition is absolutely not new.

One of our family legends comes from my late Mum’s elocution classes. She was sent to them as a teenager in the 1930s, living with her family in the Irish “Paddysland” ghetto of Coatbridge.

Not only did this training compel her to savagely punish her three sons for mispronouncing their “T”s, as they brought back slovenly habits from the big school. But Mary Kane had also memorised a repertoire of elocutionary classics: chunks of Shakespeare and Byron, an Italian-accented recitation, and many Burns poems (the latter enabled her a gig reading The Collected Burns to a convalescing contessa, as she nursed her on the Isle of Capri … another time).

McGarvey’s most attractive habit – relentlessly examining his own motives and circumstances – is infectious. He’s generated a personal insight I’ve never had before.

Was the cultural capital which my nurse mum and my wages-clerk dad tried to amass, and transmit to their sons, part of the reason I made the best of St Ambrose Roman Catholic Secondary – and also why I had such a hard time there?

Did the clearly-enuciated “T”s mark me out instantly? Did my dad’s purchase of a full Encyclopedia Britannia set, and its yearbook that he faithfully subscribed to till his death, prime and frame me for intellectual inquiry? (I did use it, but it was as much its looming, living-room presence that I remember.)

When I was a lippy undergraduate, pumped up with a little social theory, I remember making a dinner-table analysis of our material conditions – a mortgaged house, two white-collar occupations, Italian holidays (on a ScotRail employee’s free-rail pass). I challenged my father: “We’re middle-class, aren’t we?”, to which he angrily replied, “no, we’re working class – we work, hard, don’t we?”

Indeed they both did, furiously – endless hours of overtime, keeping their three boys cosy and happily consuming. Again, this mentality echoes through the decades to the present.

Class Wars picks up on research from the LSE, confirmed again just a few weeks ago, that 47% of Britons in middle-class professional and managerial jobs identify as working class. Only a quarter of the population are manual and industrial workers, but 60% of the population regards itself as working class.

The most recent LSE study hears from a range of professions, who bang on about great grans that were millworkers, or architect fathers that were “technicians made good, really”. The researchers are quietly withering. These “intergenerational understandings” of class origin, they write, have what they call a “performative dimension”.

That is, these stories “deflect attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy … By framing their lives as an upward struggle against the odds, these interviewees misrepresent their subsequent life outcomes as more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious”.

OOFT. Is that quite what I’m doing, as a middle-class media pro, when I dwell on my working-class-ness, or Darren on his? I don’t think so. McGarvey notes with great honesty that nowadays, as a successful writer and broadcaster, he is often in a state of “permanent displacement”, detached from both his old and new backgrounds, “in transition between two modes”.

But Darren also admits that hanging onto his Possil-estate behaviour patterns (for example, he really hates being told to remove his hands from his pockets by a butler) answers his need to constantly “represent where he comes from … by being angry all the time”.

McGarvey is most engaging when he opens up his inner game, the zone of psychological self-mastery. Mindfulness can provide extra resources for whatever personal determination is required to change economic and social structures. Militants can be calm and observant, as well as furious and scattershot.

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It doesn’t play much of a role in this first episode, but it does strike me that McGarvey’s exquisite craft as a Scottish rapper was, and remains, a crucial “bridge across” the divisions of class that he is constantly aware of.

You listen to his sparkling, funny, mordant, analytical flow of words – and you’re thrilling already, wondering what next surprise is going to come out of this singular consciousness and experience.

Beauty and innovation, of course, can draw on the standard resources of middle-class cultural capital (the bank of mum and dad, music training, existing talent networks). And indeed, the music business has moved its class-base towards the bourgeois zone of the dial (in punk days it was slammed to the other end).

But still, armed with just your body, your mind, your voice, your truth (and your pals), you can turn the injuries of class into amazing art.

Darren McGarvey had many, many more injuries than my aspirational working-class background gave me. But I recognise his striving and puzzling, and I honour his candour.

As my favourite Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger asks, “how can we live in such a way that we die only once?” Loki’s vitality and curiosity, fully on show here and wrestling compellingly with his various determinations, gives the professor a clear answer.