Have been thinking about videos and stories that sum up the fight against the political class and austerity cuts this year – and decided on the video below. This video shows Roy Bard from the Mental Health Resistance Network user-led protest group reading a letter of complaint about the dreadful fallout from the ESA work capability assessment for people with mental health conditions. A friend of Roy’s had committed suicide last year.

Roy read the letter outside the fancy Tower Bridge restaurant at which Simon Hughes, glorious member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, was apparently holding his plush end-of-year Lib Dems bash. For months, the MHRN had tried to secure a meeting with Hughes to discuss their concerns about Atos WCAs and to ask generally why the Lib Dems continued in coalition with satanic Tories. Unfortunately, Hughes had consistently failed to respond to the MHRN’s requests for a meeting. Members of the MHRN had decided, as you do, that waiting a year or so to get five-eighths of fuck-all back from their MP was probably enough, so they turned up to the restaurant to scream their concerns at Hughes through a loudspeaker.

The MHRN asked me if I’d come and film this event. I was pleased to. The event showed exactly the point that dialogue between people who make policy and people who have to live those policies has reached. It shows a group of chronically unwell people who live difficult and uncertain lives in poor conditions, (I know what I’m talking about here, because I’ve spent time in one MHRN member’s rundown flat) standing outside in the freezing cold winter air, screaming about grossly unfair and dangerous government policies, while their political representatives hide out and party down in some warm pile. Cheers.

There was no sign of Hughes at the restaurant (rumour had it that he’d been spirited round the back to avoid the protest). Still, the protest yielded some decent results. Restaurant managers kept running out to the protest to say that they’d call the police if the MHRN didn’t push off (the police never showed up) and a number of Lib Dem partygoers came down to ask what it was all about.

One woman – she was wearing a Lib Dem badge which read “I’m sticking with Simon” – insisted that Hughes championed sick and disabled people. “He is on his own with all of this and all I hear you do is attack him and put him down,” she kept saying (you can see a bit of that in the video). MHRN members observed that nobody whose party was still in a coalition with these Tories and at this point in history could begin to claim to be a champion of sick and disabled people. A note for Simon here: if you’re reading this, Simon, and feel that you have another view of the situation – well, by all means give us a shout and I’ll come to your office and film you responding to people’s concerns about the work capability assessment and the Lib Dem coalition with the Tories. We’re all hanging out for the punchline on that.

Anyway – that’s where we’re at as 2013 sputters out. And maybe it was just as well that we didn’t see Hughes and/or have to listen to him talk that night. The truth is that as we head into our fourth year with this foul government, a lot of us are sick of hearing MPs and councillors talk. I’m especially sick of hearing MPs and councillors talk evasive and non-committal garbage. I don’t know why I keep going to places where they do it. I attended two House of Commons sessions recently and heard the collective intake of breath as Kate Green, Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, revealed that her main advice for disabled people affected by funding cuts (like the government’s attack on the Independent Living Fund) and funding challenges and problems was for disabled people to “continue to have a dialogue” with MPs about their concerns.

“With all due respect,” one severely disabled Independent Living Fund recipient told Green tersely when she rolled that one out, “we’ve been having that dialogue for the last 30 years.” Precisely. There’s only so many times and ways that people can say things like “please fund our 24-hour care service, because we’ll die without it.” There are really only two answers politicians can give to that, too. There’s either “Yes, we’ll fight to the end for your funding and protect it if we get into government,” or “No, social security’s hour has passed. Goodbye to you and tough shit.” For all the talking that MPs and councillors say they want to encourage on these issues, there’s not all that much to say.

Back to the barricades, then. See you in 2014.