I was standing beneath my car the other day, and as I looked up I felt awe and pride. As I inspected its miraculously unrusted underbelly, I asked myself once again why people are so darned rude. This is a machine that has done about 120,000 miles. It is rained upon and snowed upon and sometimes towed from bogs. It has attained the ripe old age of 16 — and if you reckon that every car year is the equivalent of seven human years, then this vehicle long ago received its telegram from the Queen. And still it goes like a train. It always starts first time. It never misfires and its exhaust is perfectly acceptable — as pale and wispy as the breath of an elderly monk doing physical jerks in the cloisters before Christmas lunch.

It can carry eight adults effortlessly up Highgate Hill; and yes, it is true that it did start to make a noise a bit like a wounded Spitfire, and that was why it was necessary — for the first time in its life — to take it into the garage, winch it up to head height, and inspect its nether regions. You know what the problem turned out to be? A nut had come loose on the exhaust. That was it. After 16 years of blameless service, one nut had come loose. The problem was so trivial the mechanic could hardly bear to charge me.

Amid yells of appreciation from his audience, he bombs them, burns them and fires them off Beachy Head with a trebuchet; and so the country is conditioned to hunger for newer models. With his brilliant meditations on “torque” and “grunt” and “handling”, he invents personalities and virtues for these inanimate objects. He collaborates with the manufacturers to feed the myth, that if we buy these cars then something of their individual style and ethos will rub off on us. He is the mastermind of the entire superstition that persuades people to trade in their indefatigable old bangers and spend their cash on a new car; and he is, of course, indispensable to the economy and to the livelihoods of some of the poorest and hardest-working people in the country.

We are going through a soul-searching time, when capitalism is deemed to have “failed”, or at least to have been gravely deficient. Around St Paul’s and elsewhere there are good people – many of them too young to remember the command socialism of the Soviet bloc – who wonder about an alternative. They hope for a different world, in which we are not all addicted to “growth” and “profit”, and in which we might be happy with things we need rather than things we want. They imagine a society in which brands no longer have their awful cachet, and in which one family no longer imagines that they are somehow superior to another because they have a swankier house or a flashier car.

I can see why they feel this, can’t you? In these tough times I reckon many of us have a generalised horror of the waste and profligacy – public and private – of the bubble years. There is something deep within us that responds to the idea of restraint and simplicity – and on that theme, quite frankly, I am going to run my old car until it dies beneath me. But we must accept that if everyone acted in that way then we would simply be compounding the present economic problems. If people failed to heed the gospel of Clarkson, and failed to buy shiny new cars, then tens of thousands of people in manufacturing and other businesses would be at risk of losing their jobs.

Of course no one really needs a new Jaguar or Range Rover Evoque. People buy these machines because they want to say something about themselves - that something usually being “I am jolly important” or “I am considerably richer than yow”. But if they didn’t take part in this capitalist conspiracy, then we would be taking bread off the tables of families across Britain - a country that is now making more cars than ever before, and which has more independent car manufacturers than any other country on earth. At a time when we are being warned to expect six years of stagnation, we need to get the economy moving: by investing more in infrastructure, by helping young people into work, and by giving businesses and consumers the confidence to spend money when they can.

Until we come up with a better idea, it is the consumerist free-market economy that offers the best hope of generating the taxes that enable us to pay for pensions, welfare and everything else. In that respect Clarkson is not only the king of automotive consumerism; he is helping to pay for the public sector. By goading the nation to lust after new machines, he helps to keep the motor of the economy turning, and if he didn’t exist I am afraid we would have to invent him.

Of course it is easy in one sense to see why the potential strikers have allowed themselves to become so fired up. Ever since John Hutton produced his report, it has been clear that many people will effectively have to pay more and work longer to get the same sort of pension – and it is quite understandable that unions should want to represent this sense of grievance. And yet there has been one statistic that is eloquent of the underlying reality in the dispute.

Only about a third of union members even took part in the ballot. Of the 1.1 million members of Unison, just 29 per cent could be bothered to vote at all – and since only 78 per cent voted in favour, we have a strike triggered by less than a quarter of union membership.

Why such apparent apathy? The issue has been well publicised, surely, and though union membership has greatly diminished, you would expect feeling to be more intense among the dedicated folk who continue to belong. The answer is that many hard-working trade union members have thought about this argument, and they accept in their hearts that there is a case for reform. The Government has already made important clarifications. No one earning under £15,000 per year will have to pay more for his or her pension; and no one will have to work longer to get a pension if they are already within 10 years of retirement.

But, as the Hutton report makes clear, we are all living longer, and the Government’s pensions bill has risen by a third in the last 10 years. Yes, I suppose we could just whack more taxes on the “bankers”, and there will doubtless be something of the kind in the Autumn Statement. In the end, though, the system needs reform, and by that I mean we must address the fundamental injustice that modestly paid people in the private sector are paying in their taxes for state pensions on a scale that most private sector pensioners can only dream of.

The old argument used to be that it was acceptable for public sector salaries to lag behind salaries in the private sector, partly because public sector workers had the consolation of more generous pension packages. The position has now been reversed, in the sense that the average public sector worker now receives £28,500 per year, and a final salary pension, while the average private sector worker receives £25,000 per year and greatly inferior pension arrangements.

Some people argue that these comparisons are not fair or relevant, and that the figures for average private sector pay are being pulled down by the many people on very low pay who work as cleaners or in other jobs that used to be within the state sector. That may be true, but it is still surely wrong that these low-paid taxpayers should be asked to pay for public sector workers to have final salary pension schemes that have been wiped out in the rest of the economy.

The TUC’s Brendan Barber has made an excellent point, that the Government should be focusing resources on getting young people into work, by supporting apprenticeships, work placements and training on the job. I completely agree – and I would point out to Brendan that this strike is being mounted, at a very tough time, by people who have jobs, and who want to protect a lop-sided pensions system; and that the logical consequence of their actions is that there would be less for investment in infrastructure, apprenticeships, and the creation of new employment for young people.

We are told that this strike is just the first, and that the union leaderships are planning a long and miserable Seventies-style “winter of discontent.” I very much hope that is not so – and so, to judge by their reluctance even to take part in the ballot, do many thousands of sensible union members.

It is time the Labour Party stopped prevaricating, and came out against the strike. They are the political arm of the unions, and it is from the unions that they receive 86 per cent of their funding. They could call it off tomorrow.

As Ed Miliband would surely recognise, it may be exciting for kids to go to the office, but they are better off being taught in school.