Walking around the Orchard Estate in Woodford, north-east London, a community of six 12-storey blocks of high-rise flats sitting stark in a constituency of detached mock Tudor houses with manicured lawns, nowhere is the division in our country more obvious. This is the constituency of Iain Duncan Smith the Conservative party’s work and pensions secretary and architect of this government’s cruel cuts and caps to welfare benefits; a government that is responsible for further deepening the divisions of class inequality across Britain. The numbers of 4x4s that drive up and down the constituency are matched only by those living on the estate who are standing waiting for a bus.

I’m in this neighbourhood because I am standing for Class War against Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green at the general election. Someone has to talk about class politics, social apartheid and the social cleansing in our country on the political stage, someone who has lived it, knows it and feels it. That someone is me, I have lived on council estates all of my life, and I am a proud working-class woman, while the Labour party has turned its back on its values and fears the language of class that was so powerful in the early 20th century. The Labour party has walked away from its history, its core vote and working-class people. Labour politicians will not even say the word “class” they use the term “working people”.

This abandonment of the working class by Labour, and the deep contempt that the Conservatives have for us, have had a devastating effect, the levels of inequality have reached heights not seen since the 1930s.

It is no coincidence that the poorest and most disaffected people in the UK have been hit hardest by a government that has been intent on a mad ideological crusade to cleanse parts of Britain of the poor, and to punish them for their unfair situation. At the same time it has rewarded the wealthiest.

My colleague Prof John Hills at the LSE in his book Good Times, Bad Times argues clearly that welfare changes have transferred income from the poorer half of households to most of the richer half, with no net effect on public finances or on the deficit. We can only surmise then, that the levels of inequality, the hardships and the misery we are seeing are purposeful and political. It is also the poorest and most disaffected people who are least likely to vote. They rightly believe that the realm of the political elite is not about them or their lives.

On the Orchard Estate I talk to some lads near the shops. I know how this conversation will go. I know council estates, having lived on them all of my life. I have always known young lads like this, hanging around the shops among the concrete and the railings in the early afternoon; the faces change, the places change, but class inequality stays the same.

Lisa McKenzie at a pub in Woodford. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

These young men are laughing and joking with each other. They range from 15 to 21, and they don’t know what I’m talking about when I tell them I’m standing in the election against Duncan Smith. I show them my election leaflet with pictures of Winston Churchill, Norman Tebbit, and Duncan Smith on it; the fourth face is mine. The leaflet says “Time for a change”. The only face they recognise is mine, because I’m stood right in front of them. They tell me they aren’t going to vote, or they might vote for me and they like the leaflet as it has swearing on it.

I go to a local pub in Woodford and talk to some of the older men who are having a pint in the afternoon. Most of them haven’t got any teeth. They are going to vote, probably Labour although they know that it no longer represents them. I ask them about Chingford and Woodford Green and its long history with the Conservative party. One of them shouts “Churchill was a warmonger”. I am relieved, I was getting nervous about standing in a constituency that is essentially a Tory town. I didn’t think I would have much in common with people here, but I do. Working-class people have similar experiences of oppression and injustice everywhere.

Working-class people are unfairly disadvantaged and the middle-class are equally unfairly advantaged by the class system

This is the narrative from council estates all over England. The elites, the establishment and the politicians have no connection here. The response I have had from the council estates in Chingford and Woodford Green is the same as the responses I get from the council estates in Manchester, Bristol and all over London I have visited during my recent book tour. My book, Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain, outlines the disenfranchisement, hardships and anger inside a council estate in Nottingham where I lived for more than 20 years, while at the same time showing how working-class people living in the poorest neighbourhoods find solidarity, friendship and family in their communities to put a barrier between them and an out-of-control neo-liberal ideology that has hurt and damaged them over several generations.

If this all sounds bleak, it’s because it is. A report from the thinktank IPPR shows that the gap between those who vote and those who do not could grow at the election. In the 2010 general election just 44% of those aged between 18 and 24 voted, compared with 76% of those aged 65 and over.

Lisa McKenzie is arrested at a protest against ‘poor doors’. Photograph: Peter Marshall/Demotix/Corbis

The report is not surprising to anyone who knows that we live in apartheid Britain, where some of the public are watching from the sidelines as we begin the countdown to the election, a parliamentary game of musical chairs, while others have no interest or no idea it is even happening. Only one in four voters in the lowest social-economic group believe democracy addresses their interests, according to the report, and almost two-thirds of voters in that group say democracy serves their interests badly. Moreover, not even one in 10 think politicians understand the lives of people like themselves.

They are right on all counts. When you are working class and you come from a poor background you suspect this, but you are told it is not true. My university education has given me the confidence to confront what I always thought was true: that class inequality is real. Working-class people are unfairly disadvantaged and middle-class people are equally unfairly advantaged by the class system. This fact makes the middle class angry and nervous. It is easy to talk about the poor and how they need help, it is more difficult to connect this to the unfair advantages of other groups. Social mobility is about cherry picking the brightest and the best of the working class and giving them the opportunity to be middle class. Social mobility in apartheid Britain says nothing about downward mobility, the class system holds those with privilege in place.

The IPPR fears democracy is failing and suggests compulsory voting for first-time voters could help kickstart a lifetime habit. This assumes, however, that people are not engaging with politics, which is far from the truth.

In Salford working-class people tell me they will vote for Bez and the Reality party, and they are angry about fracking. In London, the crisis in housing and the cleansing of working-class people are causing protests and campaigns across the capital. What the political elite is not listening to, or seeing or hearing, is a movement of people, a class-consciousness rising out from beneath the politicians’ fear and contempt of class politics.

While the seven political leaders soundbited themselves to death on last week’s TV debate, activists on the Aylesbury estate in south London pulled down a Berlin-style 10ft wall with razor wire surrounding the estate, the Focus E15 Mums from east London were preventing bailiffs removing the few possessions of a young single mum, and I was being arrested for protesting against the “poor doors” that segregate London’s inner-city flat dwellers. Politics is happening on our streets, and it is filling the space of apartheid Britain.