The Riots of the Underclass?: Stigmatisation, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain

Abstract

The riots in England in August 2011 comprised one of the most significant events of civil unrest in recent British history. A consensus rapidly emerged, notably within political commentary, print journalism, television and online news media coverage of these five nights of rioting, that these were the riots of the underclass. This article explores how and why the conceptual and perceptual frame of the underclass – a frame through which child poverty and youth unemployment are conceived as consequences of a cocktail of ‘bad individual choices’, an absence of moral judgement, poor parenting, hereditary or genetic deficiencies, and/or welfare dependency – was mobilised as a means of explaining and containing the meaning of these riots. It briefly traces the longer cultural and political history of the underclass as an abjectifying category and then examines how this framing of the riots was used to generate public consent for the shift from protective liberal forms of welfare to penal neoliberal ‘workfare’ regimes. In his response to the riots, Paul Gilroy argued that ‘one of the worst forms of poverty that's shaped our situation is poverty of the imagination’ ( Gilroy 2011 ). Following Gilroy's call for alternative political aesthetics and in order to engender critical sociological perspectives that might contest the downward social mobility and deepening inequalities which neoliberal social and economic policies are affecting, the aim of this article is to fracture the consensus that these were the riots of the underclass. By exposing the underclass as a powerful political myth, it is possible to transform public understandings of poverty and disadvantage and vitalise understandings of neoliberalism as class struggle.