Darren McGarvey on The State We're In

Published: 29 February 2024

Already all available on BBC iPlayer, new series Darren McGarvey: The State We're In comes to BBC Two on Thursday February 29 from 9pm.

This three-part series with social commentator, prize-winning author and rapper Darren McGarvey takes a tough but compassionate look at Britain today, delving into the justice system, education and the health service.

A known campaigner on social issues from a working class background, he brings his own perspective, insight and analysis - along with humour and humanity - to the series Darren McGarvey: The State We're In.

With privileged access to prisons, schools and hospitals, he takes an unflinching look at the state of the UK's public services, but also visits some radical and ground-breaking examples - which could offer inspiration on different ways for state services to evolve - here in the UK and beyond in Scandinavia.

HM

Interview with Darren McGarvey

Why was it important for you to make this series?

It was important to me to make these films for two reasons, really. The first reason that the problems that we see in education, health and justice tend to be presented usually in isolation from one another.

But actually, the truth is the problems that impact one of them education, for example, are the same fundamental problems that are impacting the others. And so it's a larger story about a system that is in a lot of trouble.

But the second reason it was important was that as well as focusing sometimes quite intensely on the problems I also felt strongly that we had to come from an angle where we were trying to get into a mindset where we were looking at what a solution might feel like.

And so we went out into the country to try and find what we saw change makers who were already coming up with the new ideas and innovations that might address some of these problems.

Tell us about the themes in the episodes?

The themes are similar for each episode, we show that there is a real deep contrast in the quality of experience that people can expect from the services available across the UK depending on their postcode.

So if you have a bit of money, you have access to a very quick, very efficient criminal justice system - You can get lawyers that know how to leverage the system that's in place to produce effects that make sure that your case is being represented to the best of their ability. If you come from a poorer community, though, you might not even be able to get access to legal representation which really calls into question, not just basic legal principles, but also the integrity of democracy itself. And that dichotomy there can be carried over to education where there are parallel systems of public and private and also in health.

And so really the big theme across all three episodes is the inequality at play.

Tell us about a significant moment or insight from the series that resonated with you.

Travelling to Denmark to see Generations House where basically, the local council there had made money available to construct a block of flats, this wasn't just flats, this was a whole residential facility

And the idea behind it was that a community functions best when it's diverse. And this particularly impacts people who are a bit older and perhaps frail or are care dependent in some way.

And so the majority of the flats are taken up by people who are a little bit older, have retired. But what they note is that rather than doing what we do in the UK, which is we kind of isolate older people in care homes…

We kind of forget about all of the wisdom that they have to offer, all of the insight that they have to offer, and how tremendously useful they can still be in a community context. In Generations House, that potential is really unleashed. And so the lives of the older people are enriched by being around families with young children by mixing in that facility.

In one example, we show in the film is every Friday morning the older people come down and then all the kids, that live in the building, come down and they have a little singsong and they play. And the kids are climbing up on the older people's zimmer frames and wheelchairs and pulling at the cables that are coming out of their bodies. And there's just something very beautiful and very natural about that. But we, in the UK, we still are arguing about what to do with older people, whereas over there they're thinking, how can we maximise that stage of life to make it a joy to go through and it was really powerful.

What do you hope audiences will take away from watching the series?

I would hope that people would come to the series and leave with a sense of being a bit more informed about the systemic nature of the issues that we see across the UK, because obviously we have different governments in every nation and the politics are different and in every nation.

And so there is a tribalism and a desire to attribute the problems in one area to whatever government you don't like that happens to be in power, but the truth is the problems are too similar to attribute in that tribal fashion. Now certainly political parties and leaders and governments, they make very specific mistakes and these have consequences. But ultimately what we see are leaders of all stripes constrained by the same systemic problem. And so really we are at a cusp in the development of our society where we face some very tough questions, such as the leaders did in the postwar period, well, they had to really think quite radically about how to overcome re-occurring issues that were threatening to unpick the fabric of the society itself.

This is one such moment. And so these films are a small, humble contribution to outlining what the problem looks like, while also daring to think what solutions might look like.

Darren McGarvey: The State We're In is produced by Tern TV, part of Zinc Media, in partnership with The Open University for BBC Scotland and BBC Factual.

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