TO SOME commentators, David Cameron’s decision to announce his new terror Bill in a mosque in July was “brave.” It was certainly canny, but it was anything but brave.

Brave would have been an audience of nurses, bus drivers or teachers.

Instead he was speaking to a set of fellow conservatives, religious conservatives, whom he could be sure would join him in discussing the side-show that is British jihadism v British counter-jihadism without ever plainly identifying the cause.

The talking heads outside the mosque and in the cafes were worried that invasive surveillance might “push youngsters to extremism” in a brilliantly doomed cycle, rather than following the obvious causal chain back to the more than three million dead Iraqis and Afghans since the British and US invasion, and over a century of consistent British meddling in the region.

If the British “values” that Cameron pitted against jihadism really existed, he would be the last person to champion them — he whose party are busy destroying any social stability left in Britain.

Soon the only value that matters will be the contents of our living rooms as we walk five miles to Cash Converters to pay for medicine.

Yet those of us who are of the left frequently play along with this line of argument, trying to out-liberal one another, launching witch-hunts to denounce who is really in fact racist, or prejudiced, or phobic, as we bitterly discuss the right language to use to avoid offence while the bodies pile up in the Middle East and in the bedsits and wards.

We give the excuse that there is no clear left, so we simply side with “the oppressed,” and patronisingly claim there is nothing beyond their beliefs and their experiences, and we couldn’t possibly suggest we actually have a vision of a common humanity, that is indeed universal, and is indeed greater than any one of us, than any part of the whole.

In Kurdistan, particularly that part that is currently in Syria, there is a left side.

In “the most dangerous place in the world,” they are doing what the left should do — providing a safe haven for all ethnicities and religions while championing none, through radical direct democracy.

They are combating the worst misogyny in the world with some of the most advanced gender policies on the planet. For each formal leadership position in the Kurdish state there must be one man and one woman.

Images of the Women’s Defence Units, fighting not only with Kalashnikovs but their hair uncovered, have captivated the world.

They are proclaiming a revolution against capitalism and defending it against Isis, the West’s latest creation to ensure regional instability, thereby facilitating further foreign intervention at such time as it should become advantageous.

There is a left side, there is always a left side, and if someone else succeeds in breaking forward where you have not, and calls for you to join them, you must join them. So I will.

People will ask me what qualifies me, if I’m a doctor or an architect or a part of an NGO: my answer will be that I am none of those things, and that is what qualifies me.

I am qualified because I have a zero-hours contract, and I am a member of nothing except my union, the Union of Railway, Maritime and Transport Workers, the RMT.

I’m a worker like any other, gone to do my bit with those others who have made their stand.

Before the railway I spent six years teaching English to refugee children fleeing either the destruction of the Middle East or the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps I will be best suited to teaching English when I get to Kurdistan, but that’s not so important to state as to say rather that I will do whatever I physically can to aid their struggle.

We must break down this insistence on “specialism,” these barriers that we construct to believe that the destruction wrought by imperialism abroad is somehow of a different nature to the destruction being brought upon us at home.

That revolutionaries abroad are any more qualified to fight these battles than we are. This silent assumption that rapid political change happens somewhere else.

It is my struggle, our struggle, the struggle to believe we are not driven by fear of one another and by selfishness, as Cameron and Isis argue, but that together ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things.

I will go, and I will write about the other international volunteers starting to arrive in what is this generation’s Spanish civil war, and I will weather the defamation and criticism of those on the left and right who want to see us as fools and choose to live rather in their bubbles.

We have to be brave and we have to be honest, and we have to say the left does have values, values that we are ready to die for, and that we believe those values are the salvation of humanity.

• Garry Oak is a P-Way worker and in RMT’s Paddington No 1 branch. This article was written ahead of a recent visit to Kobane but could not appear till now for security reasons. He is currently preparing further articles on his experience in “the most dangerous place in the world.”