Finding an affordable place to work in London is hard and I feel lucky to have found one in the community where I live and to be co-habiting with a group of people who want to be part of something bigger that gives back to the community. We have all promised to do this as part of our lease.

Peckham Levels spreads over seven floors of a former multi-storey car park whose roof has already been made famous as the site of Hannah Barry’s Bold Tendencies art exhibitions. In the summer we Peckhamites with other Londoners enjoy the view from Frank’s the sounds of the Multi-Story Orchestra and the patches of Jarmanesque gardening that pop up.

Down below on Level Four my space will give me room to start a new project about modern work. In a rapidly changing economy how do we find and create good work? How can we progress?   In Britain today only one in five make it off the first rung of the ladder into well-paid, stable work. Sixty percent of families are trapped in jobs where the wages are so low that they must be topped up by benefits, as I described in my last blog post. We are living through a revolution – the digital revolution – and things are out of kilter.

The previous industrial revolution gave birth to the Trades Union movement – collective organisations that fought for workers rights and better working conditions. Today a very small percentage of the work force is part of a union. There is a younger generation in the Trades Union movement inventing inspiring new forms of belonging but more change is needed. So what new forms of support, learning and organisation should we create for our own industrial revolution? These are the questions I will be asking.

At Peckham Levels these questions have a particular resonance. Peckham – where I have lived for over a decade – is changing fast. The excitement about all things from our fine food to a local Chanel fashion show were described recently in the Financial Times. Many of these changes have made Peckham a great place to live and work. But escalating property prices and gentrification are starting to squeeze out that same diversity and creativity that make Peckham peculiar and great. We need new ways to re-invent our cities that allow for new forms of living and working too. These challenges are closely connected.

So, I’m looking forward to having a room of my own in a space that is shared. And I’m hoping to be part of a new form of work and urban change.

What happened? Timmins suggests that the Blair government split the welfare state apart. ‘Welfare’ was the term they and we increasingly use for the derided means tested benefits for the unemployed. ‘Public services’ – which would be shiny, modern and for all of us – was the term used to describe health and education, the good parts. In the process the meaning of the term welfare – to fare well – was turned on its head. Welfare became a term of abuse – something for the scroungers and those living on benefits.

I know about this distrust of ‘the welfare state’. I’ve been writing a book about the subject. My ideas were greeted with enthusiasm and various publishers bid for the book – but none of them wanted welfare state in the title. ‘No-one will read a book about the welfare state’ I was told.

Perhaps.

Timmins was speaking at an RSA event held to mark 75 years since the publication of the Beveridge Report, the post war blueprint for the welfare state. His fellow panellists Stephen Armstrong and Anna Minton have recently written their own excellent books on related subjects. Armstrong’s book powerfully dissects the New Poverty of this century and Minton’s book tells a story about the housing crisis in the Big Capital.

What strikes me about both these books and their arguments is this common theme: we are no longer talking about what really matters. Unemployment benefits account for one percent of our welfare budget but we talk about them incessantly. In contrast, sixty percent of British families in work receive benefits – they are paid wages that are too low to live on – but we rarely ask why the state is forced to subsidise low private sector wages. In the world of housing opaque language is used to create a reality few of us can understand. In the housing world ‘affordable’ housing means the very opposite and the official policy of Westminster – one of the richest parts of one of the richest cities in the world – is, according to Minton, to find homes for their poorer residents in Coventry or other more Northerly cities. Who knew? Apparently very few of us because it is not just politicians who don’t talk about the welfare state any more.

Seventy five years ago when Beveridge published his report it was very different. There was a hunger to know about and be part of radical social change. People queued up to get hold of a copy of the Beveridge Report which had to be re-printed again and again to satisfy public demand.

In his report and through countless interviews and seminars Beveridge told a story – about the welfare state and about the country we could be.   Like all the best stories from African fables to Victorian novels, the story Beveridge told linked personal stories and struggles to a bigger narrative and ambition. People could inhabit the Beveridge vision and re-tell his lofty story in their own way, weaving themselves into a national picture and ultimately galvanising action. The result was one of the biggest social revolutions the world has ever seen and longer, healthier lives for most of us.

Today the Beveridge story lies largely forgotten. Like the welfare state itself, the original vision is tattered and threadbare.   75 years on we are lost in the jargon of technical adjustments and performance indicators, in words that cannot explain our reality. And so we cannot see what is going on and we forget that the welfare state is not a project for other people. Most of us will use the welfare state: we will be educated, rely on its health services, on pensions and, at the end, on good care.

I think that in this century we need a new welfare project: one that can confront the new poverty, one that can address our housing crisis and many more new challenges. And so we need to talk about the welfare state. Not unemployment benefits or the public services that we feel are letting us down – workers and citizens alike – but the bigger picture of what might be, of how we could live in this century, of the new forms of support and flourishing that are possible. I wrote my book – Radical Help – because I wanted to start this new story. It will be just the start because we all need to talk about the welfare state.

Radical Help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state will be published by Little Brown in June 2018