An unprecedented police presence of 16,000 officers in London last Wednesday night, with many more stationed throughout England, has manged to quell the most extensive and vicious rioting in the UK in living memory. The violence may have hatched itself from a protest on the previous Saturday over the police shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan in Tottenham, but rage against the Old Bill (as the London Metropolitan Police Force are known, despite the inexplicable reference to “the feds” in recent graffiti scrawls) was swiftly drowned in an orgy of opportunistic vandalism, looting and arson – spreading across London and to other cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool – with no political motive beyond the disregard for private property and the integrity of neighborhood communities.

Predictably, the Twittersphere and media comment pages have been groaning – often literally – with unsolicited socio-economic diagnoses and moral assessments. In the face of such mindless and nihilistic unrest, commentators and bloggers have been eager to tease out of the “meaning” of the recent violence.

Voices on the left have been quick to blame David Cameron’s Conservative-led government’s austerity program, which, against fierce resistance from public sector unions, has been trying to enact significant cuts in Britain’s public spending and eliminate the nation’s deficit. There riots are simply “what happens” when governments try to shave down the welfare state and cut back public sector jobs and youth services. Former mayor of London and veteran Labourite Ken Livingstone claimed that austerity measures had given rise to a “social division” driving the police into confrontation with impoverished communities. Labour MP Harriet Harman was more forthright on BBC’s Newsnight:

People are still very frightened and very worried about whether or not they are going to be able to carry on with their business […] there is a sense that young people feel they are not being listened to. That is not to justify violence. But when you’ve got the trebling of tuition fees, [the Conservative-led government] should think again about that. […] when you’ve got jobs being cut and youth unemployment rising and they are shutting the job centre in Camberwell….

Consigning the violence to rage over reduced job opportunities and welfare doesn’t quite wash. A large number of the vandals and looters are teenagers on their school vacations (some more or less permanently), rather than desperate twenty- or thirty-somethings recently out of a job and with a family to support. A dearth of job opportunities for the working class youth is not a satisfying explanation: if Britain suffered a shortage of low-skilled jobs, the steady flow of Polish temporary immigrant workers to London would cease immediately. Furthermore, the objects of looting tended to be frivolous luxury consumer items – iPhones, high-tech trainers, jewelry – rather than “essentials” previously denied to them.

Neither can the riots be interpreted as a political gesture: unlike a serious protest, there were no demands articulated on signboards or in collective chants, and no discrimination in the targets of violence – unless you were to nebulously describe the various retail outlets as “the symbols of capitalist oppression,” as some have tried to do, as if stealing an iPhone were a victory in the class war. And as Toby Young wrote in the Daily Telegraph, the rioters hardly represented a beleaguered minority neglected by the state:

So far, those arrested and charged include an 11-year-old girl, a 31-year-old primary school teacher and the 19-year-old daughter of a company director who is currently at Exeter University. The participation of those from relatively affluent backgrounds, either in full-time education or full-time employment, makes a nonsense of the knee-jerk responses of Ken Livingstone and Harriet Harman, blaming cuts to the Education Maintenance Allowance, among other things.

A more plausible “root cause” is the parlous state of British inner-city state education, which has turned out a generation of unemployable youth, who are understandably angry at their dim prospects and their miserable state-provided living environments. This introduces a different, and altogether more damning, diagnosis: the failure of the policies of post-war social democratic orthodoxy, and the cumulative growth of the welfare state, to address the problems of urban poverty and the integration of marginalized classes into wider society – indeed, social democracy’s role in destroying the integrity of families, in discouraging bourgeois aspiration, and in uprooting traditional community values which historically served to harmonize and reconcile society to itself. Brendan O’Neill wrote possibly the final word on this “mob made by the welfare state” in Spiked Online:

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. […] Nurtured in large part by the welfare state, financially, physically and educationally, socialised more by the agents of welfarism than by their own neighbours or community representatives, these youth have little moral or emotional attachment to the areas they grew up in. […] We have a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – we call it ‘shitting on your own doorstep’. And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.