Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to a special recording of the Penguin podcast.

It's also going out as a streamed event, so welcome to everyone

watching at home. My name is Nihal Arthaniaka, and today my guest is a writer, quite obviously,

hip-hop artist, broadcaster and campaigner. His name is Darren McGarvey. His best-selling and

acclaimed first book, Poverty Safari, was awarded the All-World

Prize for Political Writing. His latest book, The Social Distance Between Us, How Remote Politics

Wrecked Britain, is a searing look at the gap between the powerful and the powerless,

which asks uncomfortable questions about the role of the middle class in perpetuating inequality.

Darren, nice to see you.

Hello, now. How are you?

I'm good, I'm good.

I'm going to start with a question that you may regard to be platitudinal or platitudinous.

And that is, where does optimism come from?

Well, that's a good question.

Obviously, for people like myself who have been concerned for much of our life with some

of the grammar aspects of life in a country like Britain, then we can give the impression

that we are very negative because we're

issuing the feel good story that you could potentially tell and that a lot of people are very

successful in how they tell it. And instead, we tend to focus on those that are left behind

and trying to create a vivid, authentic, compassionate picture of what it is that they experience.

But actually, I think for me, the optimism on a personal level is expressed in the fact that I even bother.

...