For me, it was my first trip to see a child psychologist.

It was the West End of Glasgow. In this new area of town the streets were clean and there was no shortage of transport options. People were free to dress as ridiculously as they wanted without the fear of ridicule or violence. And while the place was certainly very crowded there was also an air of stillness that could be characterised as peaceful.

It just wasn't like that where I grew up. When your point of origin is a deprived community you don't become aware of what you are being deprived of until you have something else to compare yourself to.

From that day to this, that palpable deficit in the social, economic and cultural experience between the social classes is ever more apparent to me. I live on that fault-line and my life has become about trying to explain what I've seen to people on both sides of the divide. To my frustration the mechanisms for meaningfully discussing the issue are crumbling before my eyes.

What I am talking about, of course, is that thorny issue of class.

Whether placing your blind faith in the advice of a doctor, being assessed or disciplined by a teacher, interviewed by a social worker or children's panel or cuffed by a police officer and advised by a lawyer before appearing in front of a judge, class is the elephant in every room.

Most of the editors and journalists that shape your perception of the world and the image of your community; the producers who commission the radio and TV shows that present you as a caricature of a stereotype; many of the left-leaning public sector officials, politicians, trade unionists, community artists and third sector mercenaries are, themselves, increasingly dependent on structural disparity to keep them in a job.

The third sector alone is a £5bn-a-year recession-proof industry where people don't so much as urinate without filing expense claims while talking in platitudes to the underprivileged about the virtue of volunteering.

It's the ultimate expression of inequality: A poverty management system in which the economic success and cultural dominance of one class is predicated on the perpetual malaise of those with no agency to transcend their difficulties.

Brexit Britain is a glimpse of what happens when those at the bottom start waking up to that fact. And while these working class communities may not understand the intricate mechanics of economics they definitely get a strong sense that everyone who can shaft them is shafting them.

If we want to pull back from the cliff-edge of far-right politics, where people vote out of a desire for retribution and not progress, then we need to get honest with ourselves about class; an historical British problem which manifests in myriad ways.

Take for example the tone and direction of the conversation since the EU referendum.

Since Brexit, multiple crises have been declared simultaneously by panicked liberals who have suddenly been confronted with the harsh, bitter and altogether vulgar country everyone else has been living in for 40 years. It's been an infuriating fortnight watching one Guardian subscriber after the other lament how the country has gone to the dogs - by dogs they mean working class - and that things will have to change.

Unsurprisingly the only thing that doesn't have to change, ostensibly, are the liberals and the condescending manner in which they conduct themselves; issuing declaration after declaration about topics they have little experience of, like immigration, from affluent communities where economic migrants and refugees are only ever seen on the pages of broadsheet newspapers.

My deepest sympathy has been with this specialist class of affluent professionals, aspiring students and terrible artists, so heartbroken they were to discover Great Britain is not the country Jeremy Vine describes. Radio phone-ins about the pros and cons of refrigerating coleslaw seem so trite and indulgent in the face of this emerging dystopia.

Luckily, the UK liberal intelligentsia is quite culturally insulated and has enough influence and privilege to create its own version of reality where twibbons, safety pins and gender-neutral gingerbread products are all that's needed to resolve the crisis.

A deluge of condescending, patronising and emotionally hysterical social media posts and online campaigns have been launched as middle class people everywhere move quickly to enter and dominate conversations about issues everyone else has been dealing with for years.

Not satisfied that this situation was ironic enough, thousands of lefties took to Facebook to express their disgust at "dirty" "vermin" "Brexit" "scum" for using political anger and frustration as an excuse for dehumanising large sections of the population.

Thankfully in Scotland class is no longer an issue. Or at least not an issue worth discussing given that talking about it would draw attention to the deep social divides nationalist rhetoric attempts to conceal. Which means we are relying exclusively on the left to keep the conversation about class alive.

And that's the problem.

The left is more than just a disorganised expression of quasi-socialist politics. In Scotland the left is also institutional in the form of universities, large sections of the media and creative industries as well as the third sector and civil service. But sadly that left has become infected with a new kind of privilege to which it is evidently blind and nowhere is this more apparent than the pursuit of 'social justice'.

Social justice sounds great on the surface but as with many things in Scotland, a critical glance behind the rhetorical curtain reveals many reasons to get angry.

In Scotland 'social justice' is not only the increasingly esoteric ideological position of the progressive left but it's also become a lucrative recession-proof industry.

A big chunk of what we would call 'the left' is, in actual fact, a relatively prosperous managerial class collectively chaperoning the poor and vulnerable around their own lives -- while speaking on their behalf.

A ceaseless cascade of advocates, consultants, charities, advisers, lobbyists, activists and NGOs all claiming to fight on behalf of some marginalised group or represent some worthy cause on behalf of a mystical public seemingly unable to speak up for itself.

To be frank, it's all quite far removed from the day-to-day experience of those it purports to serve, and while thoroughly well-intentioned, it never really offers people a chance to take matters into their own hands. It's about managing people in deprivation as opposed to empowering them to free themselves.

It's not unusual for an organisation, set up to tackle poverty, to book a corporate function suite, order a massive spread and wheel out some poor people to speak in front of funders or politically important figures who gaze on sentimentally in a mutual back-patting session funded by taxpayers.

But try telling them how crass that is.

This is a very bizarre area of Scottish life where people on high salaries announce their grand strategies from an unearned moral high ground without any real scrutiny of how their existence alone actually undermines the idea of real empowerment. It's the ultimate echo chamber where professionals talk in platitudes about empowering working class communities but then get very nervous when working class people actually open their mouths and speak -- trust me.

In fact, working class involvement is usually tokenistic and designed to authenticate the middle class systems managers. Managers who come to view the poor as vessels from which evidence and narrative is extracted and fed back into a mill of exclusive, self-justifying conversations from which the poor are usually excluded.

Ironically, it's also full of people who find working class culture vulgar.

What I am describing here is the Scottish Poverty Industry in all of its spectacular obscenity; a corpora te-scale manifestation of the grotesque class inequality that is literally tearing the UK apart.

An industry with its own language, laws and customs as well as its own news service. An industry that would collapse if society was more equal because it depends on the poverty for its perpetuation.

When you add this very tangible and demonstrable aspect of class inequality onto the cultural factors I described earlier then what you have is a society where working class people get more and more frustrated.

They get frustrated because the world they experience does not correspond with the one they see on TV. They get frustrated because a rotating cast of strangers keeps appearing on the scene to explain everything for them while not giving any time for them to respond. They get frustrated because when they try to discuss the problems in their community they are shooshed or shamed or asked glib and evasive questions like: Could you define what you mean by 'middle-class'?

The left can't challenge it because it's the left that's perpetuating it; an ideological Frankenstein's monster where moral fortitude is simply assumed because people use the words "social justice".

The problem is compounded by a far-left consumed by factionalism and inter-sectional identity politics; an exclusive conversation about inclusivity. A far-left where there is little cultural sophistication or emotional literacy in how ideas are disseminated beyond the in-group and where the language of condemnation is always the first resort when faced with an ideological disagreement.

In such a frenzied context any meaningful discussion about class is eroded and the people the left always claim to represent end up opting for a simpler form of nationalism which is both comfortingly over-simplified and avoids the root of the problem. Down south they went for Farage. Thankfully up here we have something far less volatile -- for now.

But make no mistake that class disparity is absolutely the Scottish status quo. Class inequality and the social havoc and expense it wreaks is undeniable.

Class is the Scottish problem independence will not solve.

And that suits many defensive sections of the influential, aspirational Yes-voting middle within the left who find such dialogue deeply uncomfortable -- because it means casting a critical eye on themselves for once.

Nobody likes doing that. But unless we get real about the massive social, economic and cultural class disparity in Scotland then all this constitutional upheaval will have been a massive red herring.

Commentary by Darren McGarvey. Darren is a writer and broadcaster and, under the name Loki, a rapper and hip hop artist. His music can be found here.