Racism is not primal or instinctive.

Why go from the individual to the entire race, from the singular to the group, from the guilty to the innocent? We know why. That is how racism works. That is racism in action.

Even in London, at the centre of the wealthiest region in northern Europe, in so many ways insulated from the financial realities faced by the rest of the country, the facts of austerity are becoming harder to ignore.

Public buildings, built from the rates and taxes paid by past generations, are being auctioned off by impoverished councils who need the money to pay the redundancies of workers they can no longer afford to employ. Many of these grand Victorian buildings will be turned into flats that most people will never be able to afford.

I have met other black and mixed-race people who were victims of racism, often far worse than anything I experienced, and who have taken a different path. They moved away from their home towns as soon as they could.

Talking about class and identity can be as divisive as talking about race and racism.

I am as much British, white and working class, my mother's background, as I am black and Nigerian, my father's heritage.

Racism is a belief system. It was assembled over centuries from many component parts - bits of biblical scripture, the propaganda of the slave-owning lobby and the pseudo-science of academics working in universities in Europe and America.

Theories, books and ideas created within ivory towers had real-world consequences.

Everyone is happy for the history of slavery to be investigated so long as the investigation examines the parts in which we look good.

It is of course perfectly possible for a university, or any institution, to carry out a rigorous investigation into the historical origins of its accumulated wealth, while at the same time putting in place systems to address modern inequalities of access and attainment.

The most extreme among the Brexiters are convinced they can ride the chaos and deploy the 'shock doctrine' to remake the nation in their ideological image.

A hard Brexit would be so damaging to the true interests of the UK that what might follow - if we are lucky - is a great unmasking, not just of the political fantasists and chancers who peddled the great Brexit swindle, but of the historical delusion that empowered them.

If you want someone to call you a traitor or accuse you of hating Britain, try suggesting that Britain is a normal nation or that our history is remarkable but not exceptional.

But Johnson's Churchill-lite shtick and Theresa May's even less convincing Iron Lady routine are only even vaguely viable because they tap into a fantasy version of British history that has contaminated visions of our conceivable future.

The old racism of imperialism not only rendered the postwar political elite unable to see black people as full British citizens, it provided them with a whole glossary of stereotypes and preconceptions that they then deployed in order to justify their aim of introducing immigration controls.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

I disagreed with my teachers on pretty much everything, including what grades I was going to get at A-level. I was sure I'd pass, they were convinced I'd fail.

Along with never having got round to writing down our constitution and having a monarch who legally owns all the swans, one of the things that makes the UK a bit of an outlier is our university admissions system.

In the case of the second world war the distorting factor is not poetry but our seemingly insatiable need to view the war through the prism of national mythology.

The age of national leaders, or candidates for high office, has never been automatically regarded as an issue for concern.

In the Britain of 2019, around a third of a million of our fellow citizens are homeless.

When the banks crashed the global economy in 2007-08, it was they who received a bailout while the rest of us got austerity.

While everyone knows that London is both big and overprivileged when it comes to spending, the scale of its dominance is poorly understood. London is not just the biggest city in the UK, it is the biggest city in western Europe. It is also the richest region.