We are told that the reality is that if we do not take drastic action on asylum, ‘dark forces will follow.’ Furthermore, ‘the crisis at our borders is an existential issue for mainstream parties.’ And to top it off, ‘Politics is about making arguments for things you think are right. That is what the Home Secretary is doing.’

Those are the words of a Government spokesperson explaining the ‘real world’ to voters (and many of its own MPs).

But whose ‘real world’? In the 1890s the real world was one where women could not participate in public life. They could not vote, they could not hold public office, they had no role in decisions that materially affected their lives every day.

Now there are statues in Parliament Square to those who challenged that reality. We now have Labour women holding some of the highest offices of state who laud the Suffragettes who stood up to and overthrew that reality because it was the morally correct thing to do. Some of those same women are now on a moral crusade to harden the reality facing people – men, women and children – displaced by war and persecution.

Their reality is already hard enough. Vomited from countries convulsed by war and social breakdown, often on the wrong side of one warring faction or another, they flee with very little and pitch up on our shores seeking refuge, a place where they can put their shattered lives back together again, alter their reality for the better.

The thing about reality is that have a choice as we face it. One is to accept it as it is, or accept the description given of it by those in charge. The other is to resist, reimagine and reshape reality because it the moral thing to do, because it is the way the ark of history is bending.

It is what the suffragettes did and we live to some degree in the reality they created, not perfect but better.

It is what we need to do with this fresh set of levelling down proposals from this so-called progressive government. We need to resist calmly but firmly. Perhaps our resistance will take the form of that of the suffragettes, not cooperating with legal authority to the point of damaging its infrastructure and facing down in tyrannical elements.

But we need to go further. We need to reimagine a reality where displaced people are welcomed, where a nation pools its resources to create the kind of society that is able to welcome a few who need our help. This will be a society where the wealthy pay their fair share into the common coffers so that we have a health service and transport network, an education system that works for everyone, and most important of all, decent affordable housing for everyone who needs it.

This is not utopia. This is something like the England I grew up in. This is the post-war ambitious England of Atlee and Bevan who led the reconstruction of the country shattered by war along the lines proposed by Beverage, funded by an economy organized along the lines proposed by Keynes. It worked. Everyone belonged. It was a reality few railed against.

So reality can be reimagined again.

And reality can be reshaped. Instead of trusting the market to solve problems which the last 40 year neo-liberal experiment has shown us fails at every turn, let’s trust ourselves to organize the kind of society we want and then raise the funds to do it from every resident paying what they can well afford into the common treasury that works on everyone’s behalf.

We can resist the reality on offer, reimagine a new one and through our collective efforts reshape it. The one thing we cannot afford to do is accept the world as it is because that world is damaging increasing numbers of people, atomizing communities and impoverishing ever larger numbers of our neighbours.

As Graham Nash sang 50 years ago, ‘we can change the world.’ Whose up for the challenge?