UK cities were powder kegs, fueled with decades of anger

You're young, and you're unemployed. Maybe you should still be at school, but your school was a no-go zone. You don't know your dad and your mum is too disaffected or just too damn busy, perhaps with your little half-siblings, to give you her time. There is no schooling and no parenting in your life. Where do you turn for direction?

That's the sort of problem that many of the youths involved in this week's riots face. The gang culture supporting the riots is part and parcel of their solution. It follows logical process that these aimless kids would seek solidarity with others like them, and leadership from those a bit older and further down the same path.

This neither excuses nor fully explains the events of these past few nights, but it does set them in context. This is not violence as a reaction to Coalition cuts, it is a reaction to a generation of negligent social policy from a series of UK governments. These angry youths did not suddenly morph out of decent law-abiding folk this weekend, nor when the last Budget was announced. The anger has been accumulating for a generation. The social underclass of the unemployed, uneducated and unruly is not newborn, it is maturing in to adulthood.

Perhaps Labour's more generous benefits helped subdue the feelings of resentment for socio-economic plans which have left Britain without major independent industries, without jobs for its populus and without any sense of genuine national pride. Now, however, the children of that generation, raised with that resentment in their blood, are finding their voice.

You were a teenager when Margaret Thatcher was privatising our industries. You have lived your life without purpose or direction, unemployed, useless, with no self worth. Now you're forty, your boy is twenty, and as parents do you've passed on your disaffection like a family heirloom. In fact, you did it in the most effective manner possible, by fucking off and leaving him to grow up rudderless, amid a sea of malcontent.

That's how our underclass has been spawned. Maybe my focus on absent fathers is unfair. Perhaps the mothers are equally to blame. Perhaps none of them are entirely to blame for where they are (and what they are) - IT WOULDN'T HAPPEN ON SUCH A MASS SCALE IF IT WASN'T A SOCIETAL PROBLEM, SO LET'S STOP VILLIFYING INDIVIDUALS.

To dismiss these people as 'morons' or to say they are 'just out for what they can get' is to miss the point entirely. To say 'they should all be shot' is a wonderful contradiction for a nation which ostensibly abhors such 'iron fist' tactics on foreign soil. And yet these are the most common reactions from our better classes. Perhaps they should be asking why there are people like this on our doorstep.

Civil unrest does not grow without deep-lying roots. Whether a gang member (or non-gang member) was unjustly (or justly) killed by police is neither here nor there. This was a mere spark which ignited a gun-powder spill which has been pouring since the 80s, since the Tories' last spell in charge. It's no big surprise is it? The poorest getting angriest when the government represent the rich? Labour didn't fix it either though. If they had have, then this would not have set light so quickly after their rein. The fact is that, whichever way we turn, British politics has given us at least three decades now of catastrophic mismanagement. These riots are the ugly manifestation of that.

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