When some of the perpetrators of the English riots were being hauled through the courts last week, the conservative press initially fastened on a few who didn’t seem to be doing it out of deprivation and anger, including a private school girl, a young model, and the two very dopey young men from Cheshire and environs, who tried to organise a riot on their Facebook pages and were then arrested when they (and, as it turned out, only they) turned up.

But such stories rapidly disappeared from view, as the party line on the riots coalesced. Thatcher would have battened onto such people, as those making the free choice to commit crime — and thus being liable for the consequences. But the Right has taken another path this time, one in which the argument is collective and social — the rioters rioted, not because a black man was killed and then framed by police, nor later, because they wanted stuff, couldn’t afford it, and didn’t acknowledge that 120 quid trainers were rightly owned by Footlocker — they did it because they were from fatherless families, or were welfare dependent, or made to read Sonya Hartnett rather than Shakespeare, or because Amy Winehouse.

To have toffs and part-time models — the acme of achievement in da Hackney ghetto when I lived dere mon — being the public face of rioting confused that issue, so they were quickly shunted off the stage in favour of another cast, 15- and 16-year-old les miserables, children of lifelong welfare recipients, living in “sink” estates, etc, etc. Lost boys and girls, they took the stage with the adjective “feral” placed around their necks. Though they would still be getting the court sentences that presumed individual responsibility, they would be denied it in an explanation for the riots — they were barely people at all in the Right’s account, simply effects of policies, and the alleged breakdown of the family.

By now, the right-wing account of these events had become so multiply incoherent as to lose any opportunity for political gain, or expression of will. In that respect it echoes the predicament of the Cameron government, which has failed to project any sense of authority from day one. So at one moment, Melanie Phillips et al would all but sympathise with the rioters who had been denied real life by a conspiracy of leftists stretching back decades; then someone else would finger them as “the underclass”, beyond redemption, and perhaps self-chosen, and a threat to the classes above, respectable workers and the shopkeepers, tradies, etc. Individual responsibility would get a run, then someone would remember that this let the “elites” off the hook, and the cycle would restart.

That this had nothing to do with actually understanding what occurred was a given. But what is most interesting is that it had very little to do with carving out a clear political line — it was too haphazard and scattershot for that. Instead it became a rather desperate reclaiming of political identity, a mantra to be recited.

The one clear message of the riots — or the second stage, that of looting — was that several people had withdrawn their consent from the legitimacy of property. Leaving aside a few nihilistic criminal acts, what is notable is what the rioters didn’t attack — police stations, schools, community centres, etc, all the apparatuses of the state.

They weren’t raging against authority, they were getting stuff they wanted. Nor were they stealing it surreptitiously. In each centre of activity, I suspect that events were kicked off by professional anarchists, but after that it appears to have been a genuine community event. Indeed the testimony of some now passing through the courts suggests that they weren’t quite sure how they got there, with a piece of relatively useless consumer tat in their hands.

The combination of these things — the mass rescission of consent, the focus on getting, rather than occupying territory — suggests that these events were overwhelmingly about stuff, and the degree to which it has meaning in people’s lives — for pleasure, for meaning, for status, for symbolism. To deny that that is what people were after, once the events kicked on — or that the smashing up was about the place where stuff was held — is at some point, to deny the bleeding obvious.  Apparently the rioters are so stupid that they don’t know what they want, even when they’re stepping through glass to pick out particular objects — in actual fact this is an expression of their need for paternal authority.

The Right has to tell itself this story, because to ask any other questions would expose the ramshackle condition of the economic liberal-social conservative formulation that has been in place since the Thatcher-Reagan era. This double — its currentform is the neo-liberalism-neo-conservatism duopoly — was initially founded in a commonsense assessment of the effects of laissez-faire economies on social values (m’ colleague Sparrow noted the Cold War US conservative roots of this in The Drum).

Laissez-faire economics, its proponents argued, does actually tear apart communities, cultures and put individualism at the centre of life. Protestantism used to keep this in check — by encouraging thrift and deference — but in a secular era, traditional values can be eroded by egotism. The state thus enforces conservative values — values people would have if they hadn’t been eroded by the market — through official patriotism,  law and order, control　of curriculum, etc, and things chug along nicely.

Thatcher’s moment of resorting to such a strategy was 1987 — her economic revolution had created not “Victorian values” but the rave scene and a culture surrounding it, which had to be stomped on. That and AIDS had revived gay rights campaigns — and so Clause 28, banning the positive reference to gay lifestyles in teaching — was introduced.

Such a duopoly was a powerful way of shaping social life, but it only works if you don’t read your own propaganda. Yet that’s what began to happen from 9-11 on, when reckless deregulation, was twinned with an advancement of “traditional values”, the most demonstrative of which was Christian war. In the process, the basic notion that the market could atomise social　meaning and values was lost.

A most un-conservative worship of growth was put at the centre of the Right’s values, and any notion that this might be socially corrosive was simply banned. Much of this was political, a response to the clear message from science that Green movement predictions of imminent natural limits (in climate especially) were proving correct. But it soon became a core belief, part of the Right’s identity.

Thus, if an uncontrolled market could have no bad effect on cultural and character, the source of social decay that could produce rioting, low-slung trousers and Amy Winehouse, must be elsewhere. Hence the focus on “elites”, education systems, parenting, etc, etc. This leads to the absurd formulation that what surrounds people — media, advertising, the cult of obscene wealth, celebrity as virtue, all associated and used to sell consumption — has no effect on people, even if it is clear that it shapes the core values of social life — while schools, curricula, and the state have some highly focused shaping effect.

This doesn’t make a blind bit of sense, but it’s not meant to. The trouble starts when you try to use such a formulation to steer social policy. The Cold War conservatives were alive to the “nihilistic” power of capitalism (Irving Kristol’s words, not mine) because they believed themselves to be in a life or death struggle with Communism, a situation in which you don’t want to be conning yourself. Since the end of the Cold War, the Right has lost the enemy that gave it an identity, and has come apart, venturing down every byway of irrationalism and opportunism.

So now it is trying to drive a vehicle that it knows doesn’t work, because it was designed not to. Heading into an era in which they propose to widen inequality — of life, of opportunity, of outcome — they have no real strategy for managing the effects it will have on social solidarity and values. The argument about what happened — a failure of social values, or a series of individual malfeasances — veers from side to side.

Perhaps it was this abject spectacle that led Tony Blair to break custom on intervening in domestic debates. Writing in The Observer he restated New Labour’s approach — to take neo-liberalism as the energy of growth, have little concern for equality of opportunity, and improve the lives of the poor by targeting the small number of people alleged to be so utterly dysfunctional that they are essentially low-level psychopaths. This was the nub of Labour’s “crime/causes of crime” approach — the argument that underpinned such things as ASBOS.

One chaotic criminal family could cause misery in a whole housing estate, the argument went, and the most immediate improvement in many people’s lives would be to sequester them away, re-parent the children, etc, etc. You would have to be a liberal rights fetishist, or have never lived in the dead zones of London, to not recognise that there was a great deal of truth to this. Blair’s argument is that a response to the riots that was neither cheaply moralising, nor “giving in”, would be to see them as an outcome of the incomplete application of this strategy, to return to it, and widen it. He was essentially challenging Cameron to be what he said he was — the new Blair.

Blair’s analysis was head and shoulders above anything that has come from the right or the centre on the events — it should be, since he had successfully managed the consolidation of neo-liberalism in the UK by employing it.  There is barely a ghost of progressivism in it of course — at best it is intensive behavioural management, at worst underclass triage — but it at least has some materiality to it. The trouble is that it’s simply wrong, and it was the initial stories about the riots that demonstrated why.

It’s clear, from the people who are being charged, that rioters came from every social dimension of the areas where things kicked off. If it was hoodies that dominated the TV images, it was “good kids” who were getting into it as well, and quite spontaneously it would appear. They were doing so, one would suggest, not because their morality had broken down, but because the culture can no longer project a morality that would make people feel it is somehow right that some have the trainers or MP4s they want、and others don’t.

If you live in a world where personal identity is formed by consumption, and all around you is evidence of consumption without production — shops and ads but no factories or workshops — then the whole ideas that there is something improper about taking what you want collapses. Blair’s focus on criminogenic families (in the dying days of Labour Ed Balls proposed putting CCTVs in the homes of the “20,000 worst families”) is merely the most sophisticated version of the Right wing myth — that the riots do not represent, in some crucial way, a withdrawal of consent.

Thus the powers that be will plunge back and forth between morality tales, exemplary punishment of clueless Facebookers and hamfisted intervention. Meanwhile, the gap widens, the second recession looms, and the structural crises of Europe and the US become clearer. The Right have never been less prepared for the challenges that are about to come their way.