[This is long and about politics. Don't bother reading it if you don't like ranting.]

A lot like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, I feel I have to express my admiration and support for those on strike yesterday.  The ‘hit to the economy’ is of course one we should all be happy to bear as it is done far more in the national interest than the utterly pointless hit the economy faced because two entirely run-of-the-mill rich people decided to get married earlier in the year.

Now, there are of course very good arguments about why pensions need to be reformed. It reminds me of the argument about school fees in that respect.  For anyone who thinks university should be free for all, you have to at least address the fact that since we collectively decided it should be free there has been a vast increase in the percentage of the population wanting to go to university.  So if it should be free for everyone, how are we going to fund an order of magnitude rise in the cost? Similarly with pensions: given how much longer we are all living at the moment, if we want to give people a reasonable government pension, we are going to have to find a lot of money from somewhere.

These are all valid questions, no matter how far to the left you lean.  Of course, ‘maybe the rich could pay some fucking tax for a change’ is a pretty reasonable answer, but that is only one small part of the wider problem. The question should also be posed as to why, if we have a hole in our budget, is it once again the people at the lower end of the income scale who are being asked to patch it up? But we’re really in no position to answer that because the fundamental problem we are facing today is that democracy has ceased to function in any meaningful way, and we have to fix it.

At the moment is that those who rule us are in no way accountable to us.  Once the banking system collapsed, we bailed them out.  Rich people gambled, rich people lost, everyone else had a multi-billion-pound whip-round for them.  This is sensible in some ways, because the financial turmoil to which we might otherwise have been subjected wouldn’t have been good for anyone.

But once we gave them money, what did we get?  Do we have any right to ask for it back?  It wasn’t supposed to be a fucking gift – it was an emergency measure to prevent a meltdown – but if these same poor impoverished institutions are rich enough to be handing out pornographic bonuses again, aren’t they rich enough to pay for some of the financial hardship our country is experiencing precisely because we just gave them billions of pounds in the first place?

Of course not, because the government really aren’t answerable to us.  They answer to companies who won’t pay tax, but who pay billions of pounds in party funding in order to own the national decision-making process outright.  Voting Labour or Conservative or (ahh hah ha ha haaa!) Lib Dem makes no difference to any of this, because we don’t have the power to make a disobedient politician suffer consequences.  They fuck with their donors and they’re out, they can’t campaign, their party can’t afford not to blacklist them, and they’re dead in the water. We saw how powerful these lobbyists can become when one of them recently spent months going to government meetings with the fucking Defence Secretary.  What was he even fucking doing there, you’d think someone might have asked, just a little sooner.

But lobbyists, working for large commercial and industrial interests, own the political process because they hold the purse strings and displeasing them is political suicide.  But if a politician displeases the voters… well, what?  They campaign again next year, get reshuffled, or possibly still get elected anyway because we are all distracted by nonsensical partisan political bickering about fucking immigrantion and benefit cheats.

So when the system collapsed, the people paid.  Then when that payment left a massive hole in the public coffers, it wasn’t recouped from a financial system now healthy enough to pay the same old crazy fucking bonuses that got us into this mess, no, it has to be paid by everyone else.  But you know what, actually, it’s about more than that, for me, too. Here’s Jeremy Clarkson to make things absolutely fucking clear:

Jeremy Clarkson is paid by the BBC, which means by us.  Yes, we pay for that contemptuous fucking troglodyte. So before we cut pensions, I can think of a few other ways the country could save a million or so quid a year.  And while we’re at it, what does Chris fucking Moyles earn?

To be serious, though, for all he probably thinks he’s joking, we are seeing a worrying and frankly very, very ugly theme developing here: a hatred and contempt for people less successful than ourselves.  You can see it in the US press and their sneering reaction to Occupy protests across the country.  You can see it in Cameron sniffing at the protests as no more than a “damp squib”.  You can even see it in Jeremy Paxman persistently asking whether or not it was fair that people on benefits actually came out slightly better than working people, after the timing of a recent change in interest rates.

People on benefits are just about the most vulnerable people in the fucking country.  If they come out of something favourably compared to working people good fucking luck to them.  In that particular case it wasn’t not fair or unfair, it was just an accident of when benefit levels happen to be fixed. People talk about folk on benefits as if they are somehow cheating the rest of us, but just wait until you lose your job, get diagnosed with mental illness, break your back, or lose your fucking home.  Then tell me how fucking grateful you are for that shit. You didn’t earn your fucking good luck, you just fucking had it, so show some respect.

Benefits are what we have to protect the weakest and most vulnerable people in society, and anyone who doesn’t think that a generous benefit system is a crucial part of a civillised country has something seriously fucking wrong with them. Sure the system can be exploited, and of course we should be trying to stop that, but seriously, how much do you think those exploiting state benefits are damaging the economy compared to the rapacious corporate locusts who have just used the loopholes in the Capitalist portion of the system to fuck us over from the other end?

The people at the Occupy protests are talking about economic justice.  That is freedom. If in your opinion freedom from poverty doesn’t trump freedom to profit without limits, then again, there is something seriously wrong with you.  The striking public sector workers yesterday weren’t trying to line their pockets with gold – a state pension is fucking pitiful as it is.  They are being forced to pay for the money we lost bailing out the banks.  Once again, if you seriously believe that cuts to benefits, cuts to healthcare and education, and cuts to the pensions of public sector workers need to be made while the people and companies who caused the problem suffer no consequences whatsoever and continue to rake in massive salaries then there is, again, something very seriously wrong with you. Excessive public spending was never the problem in the first place.  Corporate gambling was.

The derision with which people are treating the protesters at all these events disgusts me, actually. Wash your hair and get a job? People often make the mistake of thinking that because they worked hard and then got rich, that they are rich because they worked hard. This is, of course, fucking idiotic.  Lots of people who are really rather poor work very hard indeed too.  Maybe it’s our fear of actually becoming poor that makes us treat those who make little with such contempt.  Maybe it’s because we feel that anything which implies that we are rich for any other reason than our our glorious merit is somehow a blow to our sense of self-worth.  But if you think merit and hard work alone can dig you out of a hole, try putting it the other way around: if you were born a lazy idiot, would you be better off if you were born into a rich family or a poor one?

Quoting Marx in a rant like this is always bound to give people an excuse to ignore the whole thing, but I probably achieved that ages ago, so fuck it: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. The reason the rich should pay more tax is because they can fucking afford it.  Fuck it, Mrs. Toad and I should be paying more tax, and anyone earning over £60 or £70k a year who doesn’t believe that they should personally be paying more in tax has something fucking wrong with them.  They can fucking afford it.  But democracy is broken: there is no way for us to actually vote to pay more, even those of us who want to.

The entire process of government is owned by the corporations and the super-rich and that is why people had to occupy Wall Street, that is why people had to strike yesterday: because democracy is fucked and there is no way to democratically express our political views, so we have to strike and to protest. Remember the Iraq war?  Remember how many people protested against initiating the genocide the Americans and the British have perpetrated there?  Remember how everyone who protested knew deep down that it would happen anyway?  It’s because we know they don’t give a fuck.  The decision was made, it was made in closed rooms by people representing colossal financial interests, and the people of the country, including the people who would fucking die out there, mattered absolutely fucking squat to the people who decided to go for it anyway.

Protest, direct action, call it what you will, but at the moment the only way to participate in democracy is outside the polling booth, because our votes don’t matter a fucking iota.  And fuck off with your ‘get a job’, fuck off with your ‘strikes caused chaos’, fuck off with your sneering at ‘cushy civil service pensions’, fuck off with your ‘try working for a living’, this isn’t aimless protest or a mindless rabble. This is a protest by normal, intelligent hard-working people who are pissed off at not being represented, pissed off at not being listened to, pissed off at having no way to influence their own government, pissed off at bearing the consequences of other people’s fuck ups and pissed off at being treated with total contempt by everyone from smug pricks like David Cameron to detestable ticks like Jeremy Clarkson.

If you want people to express their views through the ‘proper channels’ then those channels have to matter.  At the moment they do not matter in the slightest, so what other fucking option do we have?