Apart from the fact that some folk think they make the place look a bit untidy, the main issue people have with the Occupy crowd is “that they don’t have any answers”.

They have a list of things they don’t want — but not a list of things they do.

And I say, so what? What’s wrong with just asking the questions? The Occupy folk aren’t standing for elected office, nor claiming to be able to solve the problems of the global economy. The finest economic minds in the world, plus George Osborne, haven’t cracked that one. So it seems a bit unreasonable to expect some bloke in a tent who just thinks that taxpayers’ money shouldn’t be shuffled through to bankers in the form of bonuses, to then have all the answers to the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. If it was that easy, we’d all just pop into Millets and seek the opinion of the man on the till.

Many people are dispirited by this period and they think the Bolts, McGuinnesses, the Devines and the Albrechtsens somehow have the upper hand. In my view they will simply be a smudge in history. What have they put into place which makes any heart skip a beat or which is enduring? Nothing. In the end, there will be no punctuation mark in our annals from their paltry efforts. The game is too big for them.

This is why those of progressive mind shouldn’t despair, arid as this period is. Because in the end, the vapid and heartless messages of the militant conservatives will fail to make headway. Always confronting them will be these things. Who are we? Can we borrow the monarch of another country perpetually? Can we go to the region and say we’ve turned a new leaf but, by the way, we never got to a proper basis of reconciliation with our indigenes? How do we find our security in the region rather than from the region? How do we make our multiculturalism work better? How do we make everyone feel as though they belong, that the place, truly is, for all of us?

These questions remain on the agenda; unsatisfied perhaps and unattended. But still sitting there.

Ideology is always contradictory. There is no single, integrated ‘ruling ideology’ - a mistake we repeat again now in failing to distinguish between conservative and neoliberal repertoires. Ideology works best by suturing together contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments - finding what Laclau called ‘systems of equivalence’ between them.