It takes a lot to get tens of thousands of people to riot. For it to happen simultaneously across several countries points to a supranational underlying cause, as opposed to local grievance at an egregious state injustice. That the temporary collapse of authority and restraint will allow some opportunists to loot is an inevitable concomitant. That does not make theft the cause.

There is a reason that, in every western democracy during the last 20 years, neoliberal politicians have campaigned under the slogans “Hope”, “Change”, or their various synonyms and translations. It is because very highly paid PR consultants have told them that what the people lack,  what the people need, what the people desperately crave, is hope and change. Riot and rebellion are acts of extremely high risk which are the resort of the otherwise hopeless.

When I was studying history, a core part of the curriculum was the cross European revolutionary waves of 1830/1, 1847/8 and 1870/1871, against which you can precisely pin dozens of cross European events including the overthrow of Charles XII, the Hungarian Rebellion and the Paris Commune, and their pale reflections in the UK such as the Great Reform Act and Chartism.

We were I think told that these waves of rebellion coincided with poor harvests, which is true. It is only a decade or so ago I learnt that they also coincide precisely with the waves of cholera epidemic which swept across Europe into Central Asia. My point is merely to illustrate that it takes a great deal of pain and hopelessness to force people in the streets to attempt to defy their governments with physical force.

In his short but superb essay on the education protests that sparked rebellion in France, Thomas Piketty includes this devastating passage.

To justify the inadequacy of education funding, and in particular the decrease in spending per student, the government and its supporters argue that France cannot afford to invest more. They are making two reasoning errors. Public debt has indeed risen from 20% of GDP in 1970 to 120% today. But at the same time, private wealth has grown much more dramatically: It has gone from 300% to 600% of GDP, with extreme concentration among the wealthiest financial fortunes. In other words, France’s national wealth – the sum of private and public assets minus private and public debts – has never been so high, not only in absolute terms but also as a percentage of GDP (which itself has never been higher).

In other words, France has never been richer. The problem to solve is simply one of distribution.

Precisely the same is true in the UK. It has never been richer. The problem is of distribution. It is true across the western world. The living standards and the prospects of betterment for ordinary people are in slow but apparently irreversible decline. This is indeed due to an epidemic sweeping the western world. It is an epidemic of billionaires.

In the UK, just 50 families hoard more wealth than the poorest 50% of the population – over 36 million people. To pretend that this mindboggling inequality of wealth is beneficial, and in no way related to the prevalence of poverty, requires intellectual dishonesty of an extreme level. Yet it is the neoliberal orthodoxy of our times and subscribed to by all the major UK political parties.

As everybody knows, domestic fuel cost inflation in the UK has increased by 90% during the past four years. Inflation on food and rent has increased by over 25%. These inescapable necessities form a much higher proportion of the spending of the poor than they do of the wealthy, who benefit from lower costs of certain less necessary items that explain the official inflation measure being much lower than the lived experience of most people. This is an officially acknowledged though little published reality.

The wars in Ukraine and Iran are directly responsible for much of the inflation. They are however a consequence of the concentration of wealth, not a separate factor. Billionaires make money from war. They make money from weapons and from lending to governments. They make money from military and security contracts. The make money from high hydrocarbon prices, They make money from asset value fluctuations between hot war and negotiation. Billionaires drive war.

The social democratic compact that underlay western democracy is fatally fractured. Public provision is despised, and eked out grudgingly where the politicians whom the billionaires control see it as absolutely unavoidable to keep the helots quiet.

Discontent is everywhere. It does not always show the same face, and some of those faces are ugly. But the current status quo cannot and will not stand, and their are faces and voices of courage and hope, many of  which have been heard in Europe these last few days.

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