Comrades, To Our Houses!

Occupy everything? The London branch aren't even occupying their tents. Picture by David Shankbone.

It's always mildly depressing when a right-winger criticises the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Since when did capitalists and free marketers think that bailing out any financial enterprises that fail with billions of pounds of public funds was halfway sensible? It's not 'capitalism' - capitalism requires risk. It's a bastard capitalism, where incompetent individuals who make bad decisions do not have to face the consequences, but can instead can pass them on to the taxpayer. It's contrary to standard capitalist thinking, and downright offensive to laissez-faire advocates. But, nonetheless, it's a good thing for them that no prominent right-winger has publically came out as a supporter of the Occupy movement - especially its London branch. They'd look more than a little bit foolish now.

The Telegraph TV crew pulled off a masterful coup against 'the 99%' through the use of thermal imaging technology: most of the tents said to be chok-full of protestors raging against the establishment were, in fact, empty. One image shows a whole row of them, virtually indistinguishable from the pavement: they clearly haven't been occupied for quite some time, if at all. It is another blow to the credibility of a small protest movement that has so far forced married couples to leave through a side entrance and caused the closure of the cathedral for the first time since the Second World War.

To call them 'self-important' would be to pay them a complement: if they vacate their tents at night, they clearly prefer the trappings of capitalism to the cold pavement. Their cause can't be that important to them. 'Self-righteous,' maybe. But 'self-obsessed' fits the bill better: 'look at me, look at me, I'm pretending to protest about a cause and am closing down one of London's major tourist attractions and ruining the wedding plans of countless couples in order to do so. Is it time for my close-up?'

The protestors then confounded the folly with their hostility to Daily Telegraph reporters, and by doing little to alleviate the concerns of local businessmen - who, whether they like it or not, are the working people who get up early every day and mostly scrape by. All of this smacks of a camp of intellectual snobbery which has little understanding of or care for their stated goals: not genuine protestors, merely trendy self-styled 'activists' of the worst kind.