A friend asks me if I’m going to the Palestine demo on Glasgow Green today and I tell her no because I’m not really a demo kind of person. I’ve never been out on strike, I’ve never been on a march, I’ve never made a placard from an old cardboard box or anything else, I’ve never even signed a petition. And I think: what would get me out on the street? What would it take to make me angry enough to demonstrate?

The answer, I’m afraid, is almost nothing and I’d like to think that’s because I take a considered view of the issues and try to get action through the regular channels. But let’s be real: it’s largely because I live a middle-class life which protects me from a lot of the issues that cause people to demonstrate, and public policy rarely, if ever, threatens my interests. Even in 2014, when I was very angry indeed at the campaigners who were trying to get Scotland out of the Union, I kind of assumed other people would get a win for No in the end, which they did. So I left them to it and the demos went on without me.

I bring this up because the subject of demonstrations has been on my mind since a conversation I had with Darren McGarvey the other day. Darren is the writer and rapper who won the Orwell prize for his book Poverty Safari, which explores the causes of deprivation and tells the story of his own difficult childhood in Pollok. I also saw Darren’s show at the Fringe which is based on his latest book, Trauma Industrial Complex, and it was a vivid experience. At one point, rap-style, he reeled off some of the worst moments of his childhood and the audience was uncomfortable because he wanted them to be. Change, the radical sort, doesn’t come from........

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