THERE’S little not to like about the spirit of the Bryant & May matchwomen, though you and I wouldn’t have wanted to have got into a fist fight with any of them. Most impressive was their inclusive solidarity. Religious and national divides were often uncrossable in Victorian England and within many workplaces, status operated like a microcosmic class system, dividing workers. 

But the matchwomen understood that, Catholics and Protestants, Irish and English, from the best-paid to the most exploited, they all shared common goals — and a common enemy. During their 1888 strike, one out was all out, and so it stayed. 

They inspired hundreds of thousands of their fellow workers and struck again themselves in 1889 to support the Great Dock Strike. It’s a little-known detail that Lascars, Asian sailors, refused to break the dock strike, at a time when white British middle and upper-class men were queuing to offer themselves as “scab” labour. This was the spirit that began the modern labour movement and, by extension, the Labour Party. 

Surveying the post-election wreckage in 2015, it may seem as if that kind of unity of cause has been lost forever. If we don’t want that to be true, we have to change the left — and ourselves. A friend of mine was once told, confidingly, by a chap in a pub that he just couldn’t stand women, but that he didn’t think that made him any less of a good leftie.  Extreme, of course, but we all know left-wing men who express misogynist behaviour. Women too often wait in vain for this to be challenged by “good” men, only to find allowances instead made for so-and-so because he’s a good comrade “otherwise,” so let’s not rock the boat. Well, no. Good comrades can’t be racist, homophobic or misogynistic. Male privilege simply should not exist inside socialism and nor should white privilege. And if they are allowed to, the left will become moribund. 

No-one springs into socialism as a ready-formed, politically perfect being. I certainly didn’t. Capitalist patriarchy warps and taints us — hegemony is serious stuff. But once we have become conscious, we can’t stop fighting against it.

My best teachers, even better than Marx herself (and long before I’d read Eleanor or her dad), were people I knew whose experiences taught me lessons I will never forget. Like Samina, who I met when I was 15, working full-time in a godawful shop job. She was a few years older, beautiful, cool and funny —but her life was hell. At 20 she’d already been married twice at her parents’ insistence, once to an older man who turned out to be a medium-time gangster and whose arrest ended that marriage. Samina was relieved, but not for long. Aged 17 she was sent off alone to a village in Pakistan, to marry a man who frequently beat and raped her. Only when that caused a miscarriage was she allowed to come home. A third marriage was now in the works and Samina told me she would, literally, rather die. 

So we smuggled her clothes and possessions piece-by-piece out of her house and into a store cupboard when my boss wasn’t looking. The first escape we’d planned was derailed when her younger sister suddenly ran off with a secret Jamaican boyfriend. When her brothers saw the couple on the street one day, they drove their car straight at them. They survived, but Samina was watched ever more closely. She finally got her out, to a rented room and a job in Pizza Hut that seemed like freedom writ large to her, but she has never seen her family again or stopped looking over her shoulder.  

Then in 1999, the death of my friend Roger Sylvester would leave me numb with horror. Readers may remember the case and the tired cliches police and media tripped out on the death of yet another young black man in close proximity to the Met Police. Roger was a drug dealer, they said. Mentally ill, resisting arrest, had cannabis psychosis. Actually, he was a youth worker for Islington Council.  His “mental illness” was confined to a bout of depression after an unprovoked racist attack. His large, loving Grenadian family could have been poster children for the Daily Mail, had they been white — church-going, hard-working, polite, community and family-oriented. He had just walked home from his sister’s when six police officers restrained him face-down on the pavement outside his own flat, for reasons that are still unclear, and stripped him naked on what was the coldest night of the year.  I’d been an active anti-fascist for years, with the usual tussles with police and the BNP along the way. I knew what it was like to experience violence and lose the protection of the law because of who you were, but I could choose whether to be “leftie scum” or just another white bystander.

Despite my horror of racism, I had little idea how the grinding day-to-day relentlessness of it felt. But when the family campaign met, in Roger’s old bedroom, someone was invariably late because they’d been stopped and searched, or would mention that they’d had to sell the new car because they were pulled over several times a day. None of this was said with anger or bitterness, or to make a point to me as the only white person there — it was just life. Once I‘d understood what lay beneath the surface, there wasn’t any going back. 

Yet today, backwards is our exact direction of travel as a society. Who could have foreseen the success of Ukip’s ludicrous extremists then? As ridiculous as they are, the direct results of their rhetoric has led to a rightward swing on the streets that is anything but a joke, and which we must be prepared to fight.

Among dozens of examples was the black woman who was physically assaulted in her home town just before polling day by a white thug shouting: “Ukip will sort you out.” Or the mixed-race friend who told me quietly about being racially abused when she’d gone shopping for clothes. “Well, that wasn’t pleasant,” was all she said, at first. After the incident, she had gone straight home to change out of her light-coloured summer outfit. Because light clothing made her skin look darker, by contrast, and she always got more abuse then. My open-mouthed shock at this simple detail must have struck her as naive. She went on to say she should have known what would happen — but for once she’d actually been enjoying having a tan and liking the way her skin looked.

A kind, loving mother of two who spends her life forced to be uncomfortable with her own skin, not in the segregated US or apartheid South Africa, but southern England in 2015. It’s an obscenity.

Despair would be easy, but if we want to be genuinely radical, we can’t give in to it. Hope is our business. To fan its embers, we must cross cultural and gender divides once and for all. Black and Muslim women should be speaking at our meetings. If we’re talking about Kobane, we should have a Kurdish speaker there. We need to search out and read new black and Asian feminist writers, not just Angela Davis and bell hooks, as great as they are. With social media, our task is easier and we can follow activists from Gaza to Baltimore in a couple of clicks. 

There are the most incredible people out there, in culture, in politics, and it’s our loss if we don’t learn from them. So why doesn’t it happen more? A chap I know who is a quite a star of the left and voracious reader of political works once told me he’d never read anything on feminism because he didn’t know where to start — it was somehow a side issue, something to get round to, not an integral part of his politics. I understand the “cultural cringe” anxiety about engaging with other genders, faiths, and nationalities — what if we say the wrong thing? Well, what if we do?

When people are suffering such injustice, fear of a little embarrassment just doesn’t cut it as an excuse for not getting involved. If you’re sincere, you’ll be forgiven the odd faux pas. If we don’t make a change, individually and collectively, the left of 2015 will find itself condemned by history. It should sadden us all that Sara Khan, anti-extremist Muslim feminist, is currently researching a book about the failure of the left to support and embrace women like her. There will be more justified condemnations if we don’t make changes — and we will have squandered the legacy of the matchwomen. 

• The fightback starts at Matchfest! The third annual Matchwomen’s Festival on July 4 in Canning Town will hear from inspirational women and men fighting back with strength, courage and wit. Speakers include the Star’s own Kadeem Simmonds, poets and activists Shagufta Iqbal and Siana Bangura, Inspire’s Sara Khan, Caroline Criado Perez, the TUC’s Scarlet Harris and Ruth Serwotka of the NUT. Music from Maddy Carty, Steve White and the Protest Family and Thee Faction. Speakers, bands, beer and hats! Only £4, free for kids. 
  8 For more information visit www.matchfest.co.uk, www.facebook.com/Matchwomen or Twitter: @Matchwomen1888. Tickets are available from www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/matchwomens-festival-2015-tickets-16082194276.