I LIVE IN one of the UK’s most multicultural areas. People with different backgrounds and beliefs are piled on top of one another, jostling for position. On my street there’s a Romanian seafood restaurant, a Polish delicatessen, a Mauritian bakery, an Islamic community hall, and an Irish-Caribbean fusion pub with tricolours and Jamaican flags billowing in the dirty London breeze.

We all get along, more or less, because we have to. No one has the time or energy to argue about whose culture is best. Everyone’s too busy trying to get through the day.

There’s a relentlessness to life in this city that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Commuters rise early, bleary eyed and irritable, dodging cyclists before nudging their way onto a packed tube. Revelers stay out late, delirious on a bespoke blend of intoxicants, navigating night buses and taxis through the jumble Victorian villas, brutalist blocks and glinting skyscrapers. Rents soar, bus fares go up, and everyone scrambles to keep going.

Sometimes it feels like the housing sector has been designed specifically to drive ordinary people out. Ireland gets bad press, but England is still the natural habitat of the unscrupulous landlord. Estate agents are to London what Orcs are to Mordor.

Across town, council homes evaporate and are replaced by towers of luxury apartments as if by witchcraft. Whole communities disappear; their homes transformed into financial instruments. The names emblazoned on the side of the cranes are often Irish, an ironic joke piercing the skyline.

Life here is about finding a way to let the city chew you up without getting spit out. That’s the thing we all have in common, that’s the monoculture. Londoners get one another. If you speak a bit of English, you’re a local.

Many of us were born somewhere else.

It can feel like we’re Jenga pieces, misshapen and pock-marked, arranged in an unsteady stack. But somehow, we fit together.

We came here by choice because we wanted to transform our lives. This shared imagination is the special sauce that makes London pop. Hidden beneath the layers of pollution and noise there’s a giddy pulse of possibility.

Things happen here that don’t happen anywhere else and at any moment you could be on the cusp of changing your life forever. Whether you want to be an accountant, a chef or a stand-up comedian, you can pursue your dream here with the zeal of a fanatic.

Perhaps that’s the thing that the flag painters, hotel botherers and race rioters are missing: hope.

Somewhere along the way England’s secondary cities and towns were left to wither while London and the Southeast swelled beyond proportion.

They say they want their country back, but the truth is, London and the rest of the UK don’t feel like the same country at all. The capital is still one of the world’s great cities. But beyond its walls, Britain often feels like a place frozen in another time, like Pompeii with darts, bingo and gravy.

Most Londoners would agree that the wealth of the nation needs to be more evenly distributed. But the way in which the frustration of deprived communities has been stirred up and weaponized by extremists will not improve living conditions for anyone. The bloke delivering your takeaway on a bicycle is not the reason that you can’t afford a house.

Whatever your view on immigration is, you’re entitled to it. You can share your opinion on social media, stage a peaceful demonstration, and participate in the democratic process. You’re not entitled to burn families out of their homes, send death threats online, or terrify refugees living in emergency accommodation.

It’s a sick irony that many of those who blame sexual violence on asylum seekers are the same men who think that feminism has ‘gone too far’.

Almost 50% of the men arrested in Belfast during race riots last year had previously been reported for domestic abuse. Similar statistics have emerged about those arrested during the riots in the UK overall.

These are the guys who say that they want to protect women and girls. Imagine a ‘Save the Whales’ protest where almost 50% of the protestors were Japanese fishermen. You’d probably still agree that whales should be protected, but you might question the motives of the blokes holding the harpoons.