Outrage - David and Ed forced home from their hols.

Outrage mounts on outrage. Pictures (damn the modern media) of British youth fighting the police are beaming round the world. In the summer before the Olympics!

The usual argument has broken out between pundits as to whether this new crop of riots are social or criminal in origin. It is a surprise to see old tories whimsically comparing today with the more 'ideological' riots of the early 80s. Those of us old enough, remember the same people using the same definitions in both cases. Attacking police and looting shops were the main activities in 1981 and so far in 2011.

Late last year and earlier this year, when the students took it into their heads to fight fees, they became yobs and louts, demanding to live off the taxpayer. How soon before they too seem like a quaint symbol of rosy past compared with current mayhem?

Behind the huffing and puffing about criminals is a nervous government. Thatcher took on the 1981 riots with energy and a bruted-up, paid-up police force. Hundreds of thousands of (white) working class families were about to buy their council house. By comparison, with a disgruntled police force and gathering industrial action against the cuts programme, with nothing to offer anybody except the rich and with a fake mandate, this government floats on thin air.

When in November 2005 Paris and then ten other French cities experienced 'Les émeutes des banlieues' and kids from the bleaker parts of the city fought police and looted shops the Brit media wagged their wiser, saddened heads and pointed to the endemic racism of the French state, the political instability of French politics over the generations, the lack of stable, inclusive institutions.

Now, it seems, we have our own 'evenements.' The youth in the cities are making their own mark on a society; on the main parties and on a rootless government, which defended and collaborated in the fall in living standards by over 5% for the majority in the last 5 years. Young people spit on a future not worth having as they are supposed to face the burden of a lifetime where, if the Centre for Economic and Business Research's prediction (quoted in Sunday Times 7.08.11) is accurate, they will experience a falling living standard of 25% over the next 25 years. If we haven't already, it is time the rest of us got off our knees and started to offer young people some hope.