I feel sorry for rich people. The poor things, if you pardon the contradiction. They’re like a portly schoolkid, resigned to their fate as last person picked for any team game (except, naturally, the only thing that’s obscenely fat is their wallets).

We, the misanthropic majority, just won’t let them join in our, um, fun. There we all are, vigorously debating how utterly awful 2012 is going to be, but we inadvertently leave out the loaded from the conversation. We simply fail to appreciate that for the minted minority, 2012 will be much like every other year – prosperous.

How are we going to allow them to have a valid say in any discussion about the state of the nation, if the extent of their suffering relates to choosing which sports car they’re going to drive to their country club tomorrow?

It must be awful for them, feeling so left out. I wonder if, in an effort to fully contribute to society-at-large, we might expect to see the country’s millionaires resorting to outlandish means of understanding the plight of less fortunate types – which equates to a piffling 98.9 per cent of the population.

You’ve probably already noticed a rich person quizzically peering through the bay window of your negative equity home, trying to comprehend why you’re clad in a customised bin bag, eating from tins of discontinued Pal dog food and burning failed job applications for warmth. The affluent can’t even get properly involved with austerity, bless ‘em. While most of us are tightening our belts in the face of redundancies, increasing energy bills, pay freezes and benefit cuts reducing our income in real terms, what do the rich go and do?

They go and get richer. Honestly, amateurs the lot of ‘em.

Last week’s Birmingham Post Rich List did indeed show that the combined wealth of the 50 richest Midlanders had increased by £3.37 billion. So much for “we’re all in it together”.

But, accepting that there are a few people resistant to the prevailing economic miseries of 2012, if the rest of us really are “in it together”, how are we actually helping each other out?

Well, with the year less than three weeks old, we’ve already seen BBC Birmingham staff standing together to strike in response to plans to move programme-making from the Midlands.

Representatives of another venerable institution, the NHS, are also considering the benefits of unified action – only last week, the British Medical Association openly contemplated industrial action for its 130,000 doctors and nurses.

I suspect it’s not quite as George Osborne imagined it, when he first uttered his ‘we’re all in it together’ catchphrase – streets full of frustrated people, avoiding work to demonstrate their collective displeasure.

But could this be what we face this year; Britain’s own (as someone histrionically suggested in last weekend’s Guardian) Arab Spring?

It’s easy to visualise, as is the unfortunate potential for civil action to slide into civil unrest – last year’s riots gave us an unwanted taste of unified unrest, even if the immediate cause might have been trainer envy, not job security. And, having recently watched the deadly dull The Iron Lady, images from the Poll Tax riots in 1990 provided a stark reminder of how policies designed to show how we’re all “in it together” can lead to an angry “yes, we are all in it together” reaction.

As someone whose toast always falls butter-side-down, I naturally believe that the UK is on the brink of meltdown, and have already built a ramshackle underground nuclear shelter stocked with 564 tins of corned beef, two one-litre bottles of sherry and a copy of the Sunday Times. However, there are signs that people are prepared to support their fellow man and woman, without feeling the need to spray-paint the words “Cameron smells” on the front door of a leading clothes retailer.

The church, unsurprisingly, is one such place where people can come together to support one another during difficult times in their life. What’s a smidgeon more surprising is when church leaders, such as the Bishop of Lichfield, feel compelled to offer publicly practical advice on how to help colleagues stricken by employment hardship.

The Right Reverend Jonathan Gledhill acknowledged the difficulties people would face in the New Year, and suggested that workers should consider a pay cut to help keep a colleague threatened with redundancy in work.

It’s a move that would only be workable in selected businesses, but it was interesting to see religious figures reacting to economic concerns with practical suggestions of how people can join together to support the individual.

For the religiously-disinclined, there is the rise of community-focused organisations such as Round Table.

Now, as the Birmingham-headquartered fellowship remains avowedly men-only in terms of membership, this might suggest that the “we’re all in it together” ethos only applies if you have testicles.

However, it’s interesting that the organisation was founded in 1927 and saw its popularity rocket during the Great Depression of 1929-1932.

Why interesting? Because Round Table, which has had its fair share of lean years, has received more enquiries in the last six months than it had in the previous four years combined. January 2012 alone has seen more enquiries than the whole of 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined (as a point of interest, sister organisation Ladies Circle has also seen a marked upward trend in membership enquiries).

The Round Table was founded by Louis Marchesi, who believed young businessmen should literally get round a table to rebuild the communities around them, devastated by the effects of the Great War.

The Great Depression gave those men the further incentive to take collective action. It’s surely no coincidence that Round Table’s membership has seen a boost during our own 21st Century depression, and it must be a positive that men are increasingly looking to deal with modern-day challenges as a community-minded collective.

And, the organisation recently appointed its first female chief executive, so perhaps it really does suggest we’re all in it together! Sort of.

So what is the “all in it together” reaction going to be during the inevitable economic travails of 2012? Will the year be marked by direct collective action on the streets, with the ominous potential of civil unrest?

Will we see more evidence of the philanthropic ideals of the likes of Round Table? Or is the notion of “all in it together” going to fall by the wayside, with individuals struggling in isolation to protect their livelihoods and families?

Whatever happens, it’ll be an intriguing 12 months. Unless you’re rich of course, in which case you’ll tediously continue to accumulate wealth and be excluded from any interesting social discourse. It must be right rubbish being rich.

* Keith Gabriel is a Birmingham-based PR expert