Dyer: The riots and Britain's underclass

Gwynne Dyer, a journalist based in London, is the author of "Future Tense: The Coming World Order."

The revolution has arrived: After the "Arab spring," here comes the "English spring." With London in flames, a mounting death toll, and the British government trembling before a full-scale insurrection of the masses, the collapse of the entire capitalist order is only moments away.

Wait -- this just in! London isn't in flames after all.

Some dozens of buildings have been burned in various residential parts of London, but none in the center. Apart from the original demonstration outside a police station in the London suburb of Tottenham by relatives of a suspected drug dealer who was shot by police on Sunday, it's opportunistic looters who have been out on the streets, not political protesters.

In the inner London district of Camden Town, for example, the social media on Monday night were full of rumors of local landmarks in flames. But Tuesday morning revealed that a few phone shops had been looted overnight, and an iconic rock venue called the Electric Ballroom had been vandalized. Nothing else to report.

We in the media love stories of death and destruction, but as of Wednesday, there had been only five deaths that might be linked to the turmoil: three people killed in Birmingham by a speeding car possibly driven by looters, one man found shot dead in a car in London for unexplained reasons, and the alleged drug dealer, Mark Duggan, whose death at the hands of the police unleashed these events.

There are certainly questions about Duggan's killing, and further questions about the way the police dealt with his family afterward. The demonstration outside Tottenham police station was genuinely political, and there are plausible claims that the police response was excessive.

But after that, everything changed. On the second night, there was no "rioting," in the sense of demonstrations with a political motive or goal. There was just looting, as disaffected youths from the underclass seized the opportunity to acquire a little property from the rest of the population and damage a lot more. They feel that they have been abandoned by the society, and they are right.

Every postindustrial society has a large and growing minority of permanently unemployed or underemployed people who would once have grown up into the good working-class jobs that no longer exist. They are present in significant numbers in Britain and in France, in the United States and in Russia, even in Japan. It's those bored and angry youths who have been looting in England this week.

Some people want to impose an ethnic explanation on this phenomenon. They try to define the looting and violence as a response by underprivileged black youths in Britain (or by underprivileged Muslim youth in the 2005 and 2007 riots in France). But the truth is that rioting and looting have always been equal-opportunity activities in both countries.

In the past 30 years of sporadic rioting and looting in England, every outbreak has included a large, probably majority participation by young whites from the underclass. The same was true of France in 2005 and 2007, where the young "Muslim" rioters were quite happy to be accompanied by their white and Asian friends from the same tower blocks.

For complex cultural reasons, the looters in England are disproportionately Afro-Caribbean youths, but it is not a particularly racist society. Afro-Caribbeans come last in school performance in England, but the children of immigrants from Africa come first.

The real issue here is class -- or to be more precise, the despair of the underclass. Less brutal and insulting behavior toward the underclass by the police in normal times would reduce the level of resentment and the frequency of rioting and looting, but it wouldn't stop it.

So there will probably be at least a few days' more looting in England, until the underclass youths in every city and neighborhood have had a chance to vent their anger and fill their pockets.

And then it will stop. For a while.