Since Margaret Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society, and began the process of destroying it (even though it “didn’t exist”), the working class have slowly lost much of what made it possible to stand in resistance against fascism, authoritarianism - and to stand up for our communities, which were shredded and destroyed as Thatcher intended.

The evidence of that is all around us - in the treatment of those who come to our country seeking asylum but who are labelled “illegal immigrants” and who are blamed for the gutting of services which successive governments have chosen for ideological reasons. It is in the treatment of disabled people, forced into lethal state legislated poverty because of a government concocted moral panic about ‘benefit fraud’- who must now resist the likely imminent introduction of a UK version of MAiD, now the fifth leading cause of death of disabled people in Canada. It is in the way trans people are increasingly being targeted, and our young trans people in particular are bearing the brunt of the bigotry and hatred that the government is legitimising, and which is already costing them their lives.  

And as Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism grows, it is in the governments enabling of, and complicity in, the genocide of the Palestinian people by the state widely known as “Isreael”, a genocide that we have watched in real time for eighteen months.

We live in a world that says compassion is a weakness; which says that valuing each other's humanity, and caring for each other's basic needs in order to grow a strong community is a waste of time - the focus is relentlessly on what the individual can do for themselves. Be charitable, certainly, but no more than that.