IN THE week that Scottish universities pledged to help disadvantaged pupils access their educational riches, I read Poverty Safari, the first book by Darren McGarvey, the Scottish writer and rap artist. Like many other men and women who experienced a chaotic and hard childhood, university would always have been considered well beyond the reach of McGarvey. Until very recently this country has always judged academic aptitude within an insidiously shallow framework. Even our most remote and detached law lords, themselves the beneficiaries of the UK elite’s academic gerrymandering, will always take into account the social circumstances surrounding a crime before imposing what they believe to be a condign punishment.

In Scotland, as with the rest of the UK, you are denied access to the golden tributary of academic opportunity unless you possess a little group of A passes in the 12th year of your school education. There could be no exceptions and no pleas in mitigation. It didn’t matter that a B pass was achieved in the face of dire economic and personal hardship. It would always be trumped by an A pass gained with the benefit of a private education topped up with a few grand’s worth of extracurricular tuition. Fairness didn’t come into it; what mattered most was that the most influential positions in every sphere of UK life would be restricted mainly to the right sort.

Having read McGarvey’s remarkable and brilliant work I’m not sure whether or not he would agree with me on this point. Yet his book, whether he likes it or not, stands as eloquent testimony to what can be achieved when someone decides to step out of the template. In spite of an upbringing featuring violent abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness and sheer grinding poverty, McGarvey refuses to portray himself as a victim.

Part of his strategy, you feel, in conquering the odds that were stacked against him from birth is a refusal to lay the blame solely at the doors of the usual suspects we on the left like to pillory where poverty and disadvantage are to be found. As he writes towards the end of Poverty Safari: “I used to believe that anger alone, fuelled by a deep sense of unfairness about the conditions of my life, would be enough to change my circumstances for the better. But many of the conditions of my life began to change when I got less offended by the truth: some of my problems are mine to solve.”

It’s not that McGarvey has given up on the revolution; it’s just that he doesn’t think it will happen any time soon. In the meantime he suggests we all look at the stuff that it is within our power to change. We can all bring about small revolutions, although there is nothing small about the one which took this compelling young man from the tyranny of a smack-curdled syringe to a cultural seer who has given a voice to those who had always been silenced.

I’ve only encountered McGarvey, who also travels under the stage-name Loki, on one occasion. I know him only through his work as a columnist and regular contributor to assorted political discussion programmes on radio and television. For me he is a vivid and compelling political and social commentator who can bear personal witness to the stuff of which other writers such as me can only form a rough approximation. The story of journalism in the UK, that trade that likes to think it always speaks truth to power, nonetheless has always successfully managed to exclude the likes of McGarvey from its ranks. Oh sure, we thunder away about inequality and poverty and post our wise little apercus on social media, but heaven forbid that we might actually let those who experience these daily join us as equals.

There is no little anger in his rebarbative observations, both written and oral, and they are often edged with bitterness. Sometimes you sense that not far below the surface there is rage, and this makes people uncomfortable. Yet what do people expect when people like McGarvey arrive not simply to pontificate about deprivation but to tell us about its reality: lollipops and butterflies?

He is a supporter of an independent Scotland but sees no value in demonising those who oppose it. It is not the most important cause in his life. To complete his book while trying to provide for his young family on a sparse income, McGarvey wisely turned to crowd-funding and was happy to accept some support from JK Rowling, another author who overcame adversity and rejection. McGarvey has been castigated by some for accepting support from such a high-profile opponent of Scottish independence, but you wonder too if there is jealousy at work here.

The title of his book derives from his observation that a phalanx of professional liberals liked to prescribe simplistic and top-down solutions to the problem of poverty. Though well-meaning and sincere, they nevertheless often encountered the people and places most affected by it in the same way that tourists encounter wildlife on a safari: from a safe distance and without experiencing the daily jeopardy of such conditions. He refuses to judge, though, and seeks merely to explain that any solution that doesn’t take on board the voices of those who are in the eye of deprivation’s storm is no solution at all.

In the early 1990s the M77 motorway south of Glasgow levelled the one wide open green space of his youth and ripped the heart out of a community that had already been shunned and alienated; sacrificed to the cause of granting quicker access to the city for the affluent types in Newton Mearns and Giffnock (there were other green spaces adjacent to the route of the M77, but they belonged to private golf clubs and so were protected). Opposition to this act of municipal vandalism by Glasgow City Council revived and embedded a community spirit and a wave of political activism which has never been extinguished and which formed the bedrock of a relaunch of authentic socialism in the city. It has since been airbrushed out of Glasgow’s recent political history, but McGarvey here provides a fitting memorial to it.

His depictions of a family life ravaged by his mother’s violent alcoholism and death at 36 are free from sentimentality yet they are not cold. He doesn’t pass judgment on his mother but conveys a bitter regret at a life that started two goals down and never made good the deficit. With the bitter regret there is also love, compassion and forgiveness. His book is infused with these too.

On almost every page of Poverty Safari I found many of my own assumptions and interpretations challenged and occasionally rebuked. It was an uncomfortable experience but my understanding of how poverty works in my beloved Glasgow and how we can truly begin to tackle it was enhanced. It’s the most important book I’ve read in many years.

Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey is published by Luath Press, priced £7.99