For my few American readers wanting to know more about the class/political dynamics of the rioting underway in the UK, Owen Jone’s editorial is a must read. The riots are simply a disaster on every level. They are a disaster for the poor and working class communities whose homes and places of employment have been destroyed and looted. They are a disaster in that they are inciting fear and hatred, two emotions which the Right are adept at preying upon in order to enact more punitive social policies. Jones is correct to compare the riots in London to the riots in America in the 1960s and 70s. Riots such as the one in Watts in 1965 were flash points of racial/class oppression, in this case flared by an act of police brutality. The Watts riot lasted six days and resulted in 34 deaths and over a thousand wounded, all without resulting in any kind of long-term progressive change. Rather, the riots only served to hasten the flight of an already fearful and paranoid white working-class into the waiting arms of the Republican party. Much of the same is true today. The London riots make it much more difficult to form a coalition strong enough to oppose further austerity and from preventing more harm from being inflicted upon an already ailing people. I’ve included a portion of Jones’ piece below:

My real fear is that we have just witnessed another crucial stage in the political ascendancy of the right. When asked how he would cure what he described as a “sickness”, one of David Cameron’s key suggestions was “a welfare state that doesn’t reward idleness”. And so begins an attempt to link the actions of a few with benefit claimants as a whole.

It will tap into a huge reservoir of support. You can win the support of all groups of society when you kick benefit claimants: middle-class people who resent their taxes supposedly being wasted on the idle; working-class people who feel they’re scraping by in a low-paid job, and resent those they feel have better living standards without even working (a sentiment ruthlessly exploited by right-wing politicians and journalists); and, as a recent study by BritainThinks revealed, even benefit claimants themselves, who - as members of a stigmatised group - are keen to distinguish themselves from the rest.

The caricature of the idle, feckless benefit recipient is more hated than ever because of the economic crisis. A crisis of the financial sector was turned into a crisis of public spending. A crisis of public spending was, in part, turned into a crisis of welfare expenditure. To justify slashing benefits, it is necessary to demonise those receiving them. From Lehman Brothers to laying into the poor.

Before the riots, that largely meant them being lazy - in a country with half a million jobs vacancies, but 2.5 million unemployed, excluding hundreds of thousands on incapacity benefit the Government wants to push into work. But now the caricature is set to take on much more menacing dimensions.

In my book, I interviewed Labour MP Stephen Pound who put it to me that there were those “who actually fear, physically fear the idea of this great, gold blind-dripping, lumpenproletariat that might one day kick their front door in and eat their au pair.” That is now truer than ever, and the right will manipulate it as far as they can.

- Owen Jones