It seems to be the rule of things that if you are involved in subversive protest these days, you have to have a tent fetish. Ever since Brian Haw began camping out on Parliament Square, for ends that neither he nor his supporters were ever able to coherently explain, no one with the noble aim of socking it to The Man has dared be seen out without one of those small portable jobbies, lest a flash-Eurocamp needs to be set up in Trafalgar Square at a moment’s notice. It’s the must have accessory of the early twenty-first century. Solidarity.

Yeah, take that police state! The Tents of Freedom will eventually topple all the ... well, bad stuff we’re protesting about. They – we – are the 99%.

Except we, or rather, they are not the 99%.

The fatuity of the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest and the usual suspects who are involved in it (there. I said it. Sue me) are issues I could bore on about at some length. However, given that I have a word limit and high blood pressure, I will merely confine myself to saying that if being screamed at for being ignorant lumpen proletariat who will persist in toddling off to the jobs they hope will survive the recession instead of sitting in tents and polishing their ivory towers whilst waving placards emblazoned with the legend “Down with this sort of thing!” along with other Jocastas and Jeremys was what the punters looked for in a political movement, we’d have elected the Bullingdon Club by now.

Look at it this way: I voted Labour in 2010, but the coalition popped up between the election and my hopes and ol’ Cameron and the boy Clegg are now in charge of the farm. I might not like it, but I cast my vote along with millions of others and I wouldn’t have the arrogance to assume that my view was either representative of, nor top trumped, the majority of the population. I haven’t stood for election – my view that the comrades should rightfully be in charge carries absolutely no democratic legitimacy – so why do OLSX believe that their opinions constitute and represent those of the 99%? Ignorance, egotism, or something else?

How about consumerism.

You see, you might think that politics is like shopping for, say, tent accessories. Imagine the scene: you go into Milletts and say to the assistant, “Excuse me, my good man. I should like a nice tent from the Anarchist 2011 range along with an OLSX branded sleeping bag, and a thermos.” To which the assistant will reply, “Certainly sir. Tents are over there, sleeping bags on that shelf and here’s a thermos. Do mix and match as you please.”

Imagine – imagine! – Tarquin’s disgust if the chap had replied, “Actually sir, you have to subscribe to a package of either Anarchist 2011 or OLSX. There will be stuff in there you want, stuff you don’t, quite a bit of it will go wrong and, when you complain, you’ll be told by the representative of the respective brand that it was meant to be like that. Oh, and you’re stuck with it all with the lot of it for up to five years.” This is representative democracy, against which the protesters rail, and they are quite right in terms of their rights as consumers. Who would buy that, especially in the era of Amazon, ASOS, single issue pressure groups, and campaigns organised by Pam Giddy and the Rowntree Trust?

But it has to be this way: modern politics is incapable of producing solutions that are all acceptable to everyone living in the UK at any one time. It sounds a trite point, but it is worth remembering that you vote for a party that broadly, sort of, or on a good day, reflects how you see the world. That’s all it can do in a country that contains 70 million individuals. Representative politics is there to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number according to the winning coalition’s manifesto promises, tempering this Benthamism with the understanding that, as the phrase goes, democracy has to be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.

The Occupy movement demonstrates nicely the challenges representative democracy faces: the challenges of a consumerist society which has turned us from citizens in a collective to those who are angered that we cannot “purchase” policies as we do goods and services, who call the system irrelevant because our specific needs and opinions aren’t at the centre of it.

A final exacerbating factor is how we digest our news. Prior to the internet allowing us to read our gossip in the Daily Mail, our editorials in the Guardian, and our news in the Times (whenever the paywall goes down), we used to buy a single newspaper. In the course of reading through all its sections, we came across things that were never dreamed of in our philosophy, but now we can cut those out and tailor our news experience online to correspond to what we believe to be true of the world; we create it in our own image, like consummate consumers.

One of the Founding Fathers once said that there is a kind of ignorance that comes from having too much access to too much information.

I bet he didn’t own a tent.

Tags: Brian Haw, Campaigns, Occupy London Stock Exchange, Protest