Twenty-fourteen hasn't been with us very long, but already Britain is in the tangible grip of fear.

Many socialists would have already realised that 2014 would be no picnic as Cameron, Osborne and co set out their stall to win power outright in 2015.

With new year bells still ringing in our ears, the government, backed up by a right-wing media, has been swift to act, sensing that this year the hunt for power in 2015 will be the most bloody we have had in generations.

The turn of the year saw David Cameron trying vainly to outrun Ukip on immigration policy.

The Daily Mail camped out at the arrivals lounge at a London airport eagerly awaiting the "flood" of Romanians and Bulgarians who would be arriving on New Year's Day.

Describing a Romanian GP coming to take up a post in Britain as "wearing a suit and tie" - as if the Mail was in shock he wasn't wearing rags and trying to claim benefits the minute he arrived - the newspaper then launched into its usual hysterical overdrive.

The best it could come up with was following a Romanian man who had secured an arduous 8am to 6pm job at a carwash to his first day at work and saying the man had been "true to his word" by turning up for work at the allotted address he had given customs.

While Cameron wrestles with the EU over his proposed immigration changes, Nigel Farage and Ukip keep making wild statements such as their suggestion that immigrants should "wait five years to claim benefits."

Yet it is these headlines that are seeping into the public psyche and socialists should seek to counteract this at every level.

Just take a look at the facts. For example, the percentages of immigrants who work, the amount of businesses owned by immigrants in our communities that we would hate to have to do without or the rich culture that immigrants bring into Britain with their different foods, clothes and music.

The year so far has also seen George Osborne visiting a factory where employees were forced to listen to his further slashing of the social security net by £12 billion.

The looks on the workers' faces said it all. Here were people who were making National Insurance contributions to the state in case they ever fell on hard times and needed that safety net until they could get back on their feet.

Osborne's "scheme" is to pit the old against young as he raged about cuts coming to housing benefit for under-25s while increasing and protecting pensions for the retired.

Only £10bn of the social security budget is spent on the unemployed, whereas £127.5bn is spent on pensions. Yet none of the right-wing media will quote these figures. The young and working families may well feel angry that they are being asked to shoulder an increasing cuts burden.

But it is vital that they to turn their anger on the government and not the elderly.

There will of course be a harder burden to bear for the working poor as tax credits are being "reformed" and the pernicious universal credit scheme brought in for most in 2016.

Alongside this will be a ban on people earning over £40k being able to live in a council house.

Also this year we've seen, for the first time in over 100 years, barristers taking a stand.

They withdrew their labour - a strike almost - in opposition to this government's drastic cuts in legal aid.

Not only are young lawyers enduring low salaries as a result of Chris Grayling massively slashing the legal aid budget, many ordinary people now are entirely excluded from the justice system.

And the media is shamelessly reinforcing the anti-working-class narrative.

Channel 4 decided to broadcast a "documentary" called Benefits Street which focused on a street of 99 houses.

It then picked out a few people who were receiving benefits to publicly hang, draw and quarter. Exploitation is too soft a word.

After the broadcast residents said that Channel 4 had manipulated people, shown the street in a bad light and edited the programme to depict its own preconceived ideas of scroungers.

This programme resulted in the people who featured on it receiving death threats on Twitter.

Shows such as Benefits Britain and the BBC Saints and Scroungers drip feed into the public imagination, taking the heat off the bankers and the multimillionaire MPs in Cameron's party who are the real cause of the country's problems - MPs like Nadhim Zahawi, who spent £5.8k of public money on heating his horses' stables.

Then there's Michael Gove, one of the most reviled ministers in the Cabinet.

The fear that now stalks teachers and threatens our children's education is another facet of this government's devil-faced policies.

Gove has decided that rather than commemorate the anniversary of World War I and its fallen soldiers in a sombre and respectful fashion, he will instead turn it into a political point-scoring contest against the left.

His condemnation of Blackadder as "leftist" and his Rupert Brooke-type notion that WWI was a glorious occasion for the British empire against Germany are straight out of a 1950s grammar school handbook.

I have always maintained that MPs should have outside experience in the role over which they are presiding, in order to have a working experience of problems faced.

Having an Education Secretary with no hands-on teaching experience is not just laughable but downright dangerous. Gove is proving that danger. He is a man who never listens to the experts or teachers actually in the classroom and on the front line. He always "knows better" than they do, apparently.

Now what should have been a respectful remembrance of the 100th anniversary of WWI has degenerated into slinging insults at the left to gain political points.

Finally after the worst month of storms in generations, we have a government which cut the environmental protection budget by millions, while parts of the country were swamped.

Where I live on the north Wales coast, we have had a terrifying few weeks and numerous homes have been damaged, as have other parts of Britain. Government meeting after government meeting ensued. At the end of it all we were told that by 2020 there will be more money spent on flood defences.

So we have to wait six years for any help at all, while properties flood and our home and business insurances rocket.

In the meantime the government twiddles its thumbs and slashes 1,200 jobs from the Environment Agency.

The government rhetoric is being ramped up, feeding like a troll on immigration, the poor, education and environment issues.

It is our duty as socialists to stand up, be counted, give the other side to the story.

Most of all it is our duty to fight back. I believe the esteemed Tony Benn has urged us not to forget how to fight. We must listen to him now in 2014 for fear of further untold damage to the immigration system, welfare state and education must not be allowed to happen. Join in the fightback.

Bernadette Horton blogs at mumvausterity.blogspot.co.uk