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

The riots in England in August 2011 comprised one of the most significant eventsof civil unrest in recent British history. A consensus rapidly emerged, notablywithin political commentary, print journalism, television and online news mediacoverage of these five nights of rioting, that these were the riots of theunderclass. This article explores how and why the conceptual and perceptualframe of the underclass – a frame through which child poverty and youthunemployment are conceived as consequences of a cocktail of ‘bad individualchoices’, an absence of moral judgement, poor parenting, hereditary or geneticdeficiencies, and/or welfare dependency – was mobilised as a means of explainingand containing the meaning of these riots. It briefly traces the longer culturaland political history of the underclass as an abjectifying category and thenexamines how this framing of the riots was used to generate public consent forthe shift from protective liberal forms of welfare to penal neoliberal‘workfare’ regimes. In his response to the riots, Paul Gilroy argued that ‘oneof the worst forms of poverty that's shaped our situation is poverty of theimagination’ ( Gilroy 2011 ).Following Gilroy's call for alternative political aesthetics and in order toengender critical sociological perspectives that might contest the downwardsocial mobility and deepening inequalities which neoliberal social and economicpolicies are affecting, the aim of this article is to fracture the consensusthat these were the riots of the underclass. By exposing the underclass as apowerful political myth, it is possible to transform public understandings ofpoverty and disadvantage and vitalise understandings of neoliberalism as classstruggle.