IF Dublin-born Maura Clarke’s weighty and studious political philosophy could be truncated to just one simple word it would be this: fairness.

“I deplore this notion that society is only geared towards the rich,” she said, when I recently had the good fortune of meeting her in her Haydon Wick home.

Maura freely describes herself as an old-fashioned socialist, but not without the odd caveat. “If by old fashioned socialist you mean having a genuine concern for other people and that we should all be bloody well equal in our efforts to have a better life, then yes, that is the best way of putting it.”

The inveterate campaigner, who previously worked in public service broadcasting, has lived in Swindon since 2003 but has never before been entrusted with a seat on the council, a trend she hopes to reverse in May.

She is intensely passionate, fiercely intellectual and, I suspect, not without a great deal of moral courage.

The great poet WB Yeats once spoke of the Irish possessing an abiding sense of tragedy. Maura has this, but it does not belong to her.

It belongs instead to her fellow creatures and is born of poverty, servitude to hostile economic forces and rank unfairness. Their struggle is her struggle, to put it at its simplest.

With this she is on solid ground. For the Conservative argument is not that life is unfair but that a degree of unfairness is not an unreasonable price to pay for the luxuries and security of modern life.

For Maura, austerity is the devil that ought to be stoned.

With delicate sincerity, she recounts the story of a man she came across while undertaking community work. He was offered food vouchers for the Foodbank but refused them on account of not being able to afford to heat a meal on the cooker.

If she becomes one of Haydon Wick’s councillors in May, she tells me, she would stand firmly behind Labour’s manifesto and the party’s commitment to reinstating children’s centres, building affordable homes, tackling inequality and building units specifically to house the homeless.

She said: “If the people of Haydon Wick have any issues to do with living in an unfair society, then I would try to help them in any way I could.

“Haydon Wick contains people who have and people who need, and I would try to tap into the people who have and who would prefer things to be more equitable. Maybe that’s naïve and sentimental, but that’s what powers me.

“I have always been in the business of caring about people, but not in a patronising way. There is real cruelty imposed by the government and it has serious effects on our people here, locally. Working families need extra help, but that help is being diminished all the time.

“People are on pensions that aren’t rising at the same rate as council tax and the problems with universal credit are pushing people into homelessness.”

Intellectuals have not always lived exclusively in the realm of ideas, but this is where Maura firmly draws her battle lines.

Her ire is not spent on individuals but on theories, approaches and doctrines, Thatcher’s famous claim that society is make-belief. Neo-liberalism is the enemy; Neo-liberals are not, though I suspect there are more than a few exceptions.

“I see myself as fighting for something, rather than against it,” she said, before describing herself as an old fashioned pacifist. But despite my gently teasing her about the moral ambiguities of the pacifist position, she stands her ground.

The Brexit referendum did not come without its problems for Maura.

As bombastic author Christopher Hitchens once noted, having the gravitas to understand both sides in an argument is almost always a dreadful curse.

She acknowledged the intellectual contortions that accompanied a self-professed Bennite voting to retain the unheeded movement of capital and labour.

But, at the going down of the sun, it was her passion for culture and a multifarious society of free spirits mingling together that compelled her to place a cross in the box marked Remain. But what is done is done. What motivates Maura is what she can do for the disadvantaged in the here and now.

And that, she says, is why she wants to be a councillor.