THE OVERVIEW: Illegal Migration Bill highlights the tradition of xenophobia in the Tory party with echoes of racial incitement from global history

The room that I currently write this in will probably no longer be here in a few weeks. The building is going to be torn down. I am a property guardian in a school in central Hackney. What was meant to be six months of accommodation turned out to last just over a year.

Room with a view, the space one can gain through property guardianships compared to price is unlike anything else on the rental market in London.

I was lucky on that point and on the location, Hackney my eternal home, and also the fact that I live with eight other individuals who are great.

They, like myself, will be out of a home but property guardianship was a risk that most of us had to take. Inequality Britain engineered by the privileged elite is in full-oscillation. The 60s were known as swinging the 70s were financially challenging, the 80s get me a piece, the 90s bad clothing ideas, perhaps this era will be looked back upon as the no hope noughties?

I can’t think of how many creative people I know who are adjusting to obscure buildings and even obscurer tenancy agreements, cramped in small rooms in house and flat shares, working any job that doesn’t match their university education or are even making the move back to their parents’ pads. Here we are, London’s huddled masses encroaching on any small space that we can find to make our home while the wrecking balls get nearer to our walls.

How did we get to this point and what can we do? New Labour had what they thought was a superb idea: do anything to get elected so let’s turn to the right. It worked for them and they successfully sold a left wing party down the river in order to get their gains replacing socialism with the cheap golden coat of capitalism. Big business ruled supreme under their tenure.

This set a clear path for the inherited silver spooned Tories, and their opportunist lackies, the Lib Dems, to rule the country. The hearts and minds of the masses had now become spellbound by their ‘me, me, me’ rhetoric and those who weren’t old enough to remember never even knew that there was a strong socialist presence in this country at one time. The lost ghostly captains of the labour armada, Attlee, (Tony) Benn and Orwell had been replaced, side-stepped by the victors.

It reminds me of the, pathetically sad and unhappy, make everyone just like me – please I am so lonely, Ayn Rand and her brilliant novella Anthem. The story about a future generation run by a dictatorship, eradicates the past by calling those who wrote, created or inspired as the ‘Evil Ones’ supressing these old ideas from sight and sound at pain of death. Today, in our world, the progressive socialist past is supressed by some media organisations that choose to excommunicate you or you get laughed out of the Commons by opposition MPs if you dare recall it.

People are quick to forget that if the present seems so uncaring, perhaps most of the progress made has come from those who cared in the past. A history book could illustrate this, OR trade the Superbowl 50 coverage, for a good documentary that looks at the progressive past of these isles. You would be amazed, from Suffragetes, to the National Health Service, strong unions, eggs being thrown at 10 Downing Street, a million people in the street objecting to war. And that is just the beginning.

Today’s food bank are relied upon by a record number of British people. Atos sent terminally ill people back to work who died on the job. Big businesses are given two thumbs up to not pay taxes and screw taxpayers savings over and very little is done to get them to issue an apology or accept responsibility for the privilege.

Myself and a lot of people that I know will be all right. We are lucky to have had the opportunity for higher education plus we have the chutzpah to know how to fight for what we want. Another empty building with cheap rent, another part time job while we wait for our ship to come in, we know it is part of the process of our survival. But what about those that will not have the opportunity to go to university as they might get a massive student loan, but no maintenance grant? The uprooted communities pushed aside because, “there is no society”, Tories decided that a Starbucks would be better placed than a family home. What happens to them?

Cheese ball slogans aside, but yes, anyone who knows has to fight so that all the good in the past can never be forgotten and that the massive steps of progress for all of us, everyone, moves forward to the present and so that positive social progress can continue to flourish in this country for now and for always.