On the imaginary Baader-Meinhof clock of insurrection, it is one minute before midnight in Britain. But what will happen next? In countries such as France, Russia and America, where the clock had once struck 12 and the workers decided enough was enough, revolutions followed. All we've had in Britain are a peasants' revolt and a couple of riots when the Chartists were disobedient. On continental Europe and in the Americas, they brought down the aristocracy with guns and axes, then strung them up from trees and lamp-posts. In Britain, we shout: "What do we want? A minute of your time, if it's not too much trouble. When do we want it? At your earliest convenience and begging your pardon."

For we have too much respect for our democratic institutions and for our beloved monarch to entertain any notions of dull violence and chaotic rebellion when the blood is up. We would all surely regret it in the morning. And it is such rectitude and fortitude in the face of adversity which have given our country its stability and guardsman's bearing that is the envy of the world. This is what we tell ourselves when we have just received another slap from our elected representatives at Parliament and their cohorts in the corporate and financial charnel houses of HBOS and Globespan.

Except this year, the slaps came hard and fast. You wonder if a little period of instability would be a price worth paying to hand out a lesson they would never forget to the thieves and profligates in our banking and political edifices who have grown fat on our honesty and trust. It was the year when corporate and political Britain finally revealed its contempt for those from whose labours it has profited.

The full extent of our MPs' greed was revealed just at that time when we first began to understand that Sir Fred Goodwin and his avaricious brotherhood had been playing Russian roulette with the nation's economy. Yet it wasn't simply the fact of these follies that revealed them in all their vainglorious idiocy. If the politicians would just pay back the money they owed us without any fuss and a few of the most covetous fell on their swords, then we would forgive them and hand them a written warning at the next election. Better still, they could make amends by stripping the bankers of their bonuses and their Learjets and forcing them henceforth to undergo much more stringent scrutiny of their activities.

Yet following the initial obsequious outpourings of remorse from politicians, they began to reveal their true colours. They back-pedalled when many realised they probably did not have the funds to make good their promises of repayment. What we were demanding of them was too, too draconian. Meanwhile, directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland, having helped bring the economy to its knees, effectively attempted to hold the country to ransom: if you don't allow us to continue paying obscene bonuses to our star players, then we shall all resign, they said. They even tried to admonish us for having the cheek to ask for rigour and discipline in their bonus structures.

How can we compete with the galacticos of world banking, they whined, if you don't allow us to pay them properly? They were asking us to believe that there is some enchanted golden mean in global finance, the knowledge of which is only granted to a chosen few mystics and necromancers. They alone have the power to heal our broken economies and we, the idiot punters, would do well not to interfere.

Yet Britain has thousands of successful entrepreneurs whose hard work and adroit and proportionate investment has built businesses and provided employment. Many of them would beg to disagree with the RBS's lofty opinion of its structures and governances.

But they hadn't finished abusing us yet. For in November the new Supreme Court, administering justice in our name, allowed seven of our major banking institutions to continue robbing the accounts of hundreds of thousands of UK citizens. In justifying their wildly disproportionate overdraft charges, the banks lectured us on good financial housekeeping, diligence and discipline in our personal finances. This, from a worthless cartel whhich had just destroyed the economy because they couldn't stop themselves even when the bells were ringing at the level crossing and the lights were flashing.

They had shown all the restraint of a Mississippi riverboat gambler putting his house on black with an empty bottle of Jack Daniel's at his side. And still we merely shrugged and told ourselves there was little to be done amid the usual sporadic outbreaks of fist-waving.

In the last few days, our people have been left high and dry on some foreign peninsula by an airline's sudden collapse. Many more of them have been treated like dogs because a train system costing billions couldn't cope with the wrong type of snow and the operators couldn't communicate with each other properly. These are a sick metaphor for the current relationship between rich and corporate Britain and those who have granted them their power. Next year, we have been warned to expect public spending cuts at levels not seen since the end of the war.

Who is there to marshal our anger and to channel it in ways that will make the directors of UK plc pay heed? If such a person exists, he is not currently to be found in Westminster.