It is not even a fortnight old, but this new year is already worn down to its nub by nature's fury and the corrosive impact that the words and deeds of some of our politicians have had upon the social fabric of this nation. The country has been assailed by tidal surges that have wreaked havoc on some of our most ancient communities, but we have also been inundated with targeted demagoguery about immigration that is as destructive as a tempest. Rightwing politicians along with their compliant corporate media chorus have pummelled negative perceptions into the minds of working- and middle-class Britain about legitimate migrants from Bulgaria and Romania, rather than discuss the true benefits or costs of belonging to the EU.

In the end, these machinations are all about the politics of fear, which is used to hoodwink the voting population into thinking that all their societal and economic problems stem from an alleged open border and a mythical generosity of benefits for the feckless. It is understandable that in times of economic turmoil many of us revert to a factory default setting that causes us to fear that immigrants who are hungry to make a new start in life might cause us unwarranted financial burdens.

But to me, because I am very old, I have heard many times the same tune sung by rightwing ideologues and the tabloid press: migrants are the root cause of many of the ills that plague Britain. No matter the era, the style of clothes, or whether the speaker is Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell or a modern-day Savonarola, the motif is always the same lie: immigrants take bread out of the mouths of the working class.

The first time I heard this fetid clarion call was in the 1930s, when the media and every major political party denounced any proposal to allow Jewish immigration to Britain from Nazi Germany. The inherent antisemitism and pro-Nazi sentiment of many corporations, high-born people and press barons was concealed to the British public in patriotic slogans, headlines and editorials about keeping Britain for the British or protecting the interests of the working class. When the second world war concluded, and the world began to bury the more than 40 million victims, I hoped people had learned that tabloid journalism's bread and butter wasn't in delivering the truth to their readers but their ability to turn working- and middle-class concerns into a gladiator blood sport that promoted political ideologies over news and real, everyday problems.

Unfortunately, I was wrong, because no sooner was the war against Hitler over, than the news-sellers' chalkboard headlines were warning of another fictitious scourge that threatened to up-end Britain's postwar recovery. This time it was the Free Polish army migrants, marooned after their country had been consumed by Stalin's iron curtain. With close to 250,000 Polish men and women slated to enter the British working world in the late 1940s, the rightwing used it as an opportunity to try to bolster their support with the working class. They promoted the false notion that these new arrivals to Britain were out to take the jobs and the homes of hard-working British people.

Many of my generation bought into the fear sold to us by the tabloids and the politicians that these migrants from Europe would ruin our economy and change our communities for the worst. Back then, like today, many media outlets demonised immigrants rather than finding fault with our economic system, which lacked protective checks and balances to prevent the exploitation of workers. However, in many ways those migrants who entered Britain at the midpoint of the 20th century were luckier than those who come now. Sixty years ago, we were all, immigrants included, witness to and participants in the birth of a modern progressive state that invested in healthcare, infrastructure, education and housing. For a short while in our nation's history, the politics of hope, hard work and sacrifice impeded the use of fear as a political tool to control the reins of public opinion.

In today's world most of us are afraid that we will become redundant in this globalised economy or that our children's future will be less prosperous than our own. We are terrified that we will be penniless and infirm in our old age. In our terror, we watch either in horror or in agreement as the civilised state built under the premise that we are all in it together is dismantled brick-by-brick and dumped into the skip of history.