“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

The TV reporter from Britain’s ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

The second is the now much-viewed video of a Hackney resident squaring up to looters. Fearlessly and knowingly, she chastises them, furious that rather than “doing it for a cause” they are destroying homes and businesses, all for some shoes and TVs.

The third is less moving, and in fact bleakly comic: Nick Clegg, after biscuits in his leafy suburban garden, warning Sky News back in April last year that if the Tories gained power and inflicted upon the population unmandated cuts, there would be riots.

Taken together, these represent the key elements of the present crisis: police incompetence and arrogance, media complicity and callousness, the short-sightedness of the rioters, and the contempt politicians have had for the public over the past year that evidently continued this week. The dismal conclusion is that we live in a fundamentally sick society, not just unable to resolve its injustices and inequalities but unable even to acknowledge them.

The Petri dish in which the riots emerged was decades of neglect, unemployment and deprivation: most areas affected by the riots have unemployment rates above the London average of 8.8 per cent. Hackney yearly vies with Manchester, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets as the most destitute local authority in the country. In London, the richest tenth of the population possess 273 times the wealth of the poorest, making it the “most unequal city in the West”. Across the country for the last thirty years, wages have dropped as a proportion of national wealth for everyone but a tiny minority. In twenty years, the gap between rich and poor will reach levels not seen since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

This is not an excuse for rampant destruction: for centuries, the poor have suffered, but they have at key moments over the past two centuries responded through organisation, protest and mutual aid, and through such united action real achievements have been made in a way that setting alight to their own communities never could. Nevertheless, it is an explanation, and an explanation is clearly demanded.

On top of this is the abysmal record of the nation’s police, particularly the Met. Having been deeply involved in the widespread phone hacking criminal conspiracy as co-conspirators rather than investigators, and with numerous high-profile cases of both them and the IPCC clearly covering-up their role in killings on London’s streets, it was hardly surprising that when they shot Mark Duggan they immediately came under angry scrutiny from locals.

Their inability to handle the simple questions they were asked is testament to their arrogance, but this was by no means isolated. The figures for the amount of deaths in police custody and following contact with the police are staggering. Since 1998, 333 people have died in custody with no officer ever convicted.

Their demeaning harassment of the youth through stop and search, with certain communities particularly targeted, is a clear burden incomprehensible to those who don’t have to put up with it. Nor was it very long ago that the Tories were planning to bring back the disastrous Sus laws. It should be unsurprising then that criminalising entire populations makes them more willing to commit criminal acts.

And where were politicians amongst this? Osborne was in Los Angeles, Cameron in Tuscany, Clegg in Spain, with Johnson refusing to state where he was and evidently reluctant to come back. The problem is not so much that they were on holiday, but more that a foreign holiday is a luxury few can now afford. When Tory MP Oliver Letwin said he didn’t want “people from Sheffield going on any more cheap holidays”, he revealed the class hatred that motivates many of his kind.

Such sentiment is the bitter fuel for the austerity drive that is breaking our country apart, and the targets of this assault are not just the poor youth of our inner city neighbourhoods but also workers such as the fire fighters battling to save those same neighbourhoods from flames. The insanity of the rioting becomes clearest here: we should be uniting against the greed and recklessness of austerity, not replicating it.

Yet some in the left are wrong to refuse to condemn the riots because they are instead the result of structural problems rather than merely bad parenting or the moral failure of the rioters. The early cheering that an “insurrection” was underway in Tottenham was dampened when the targets shifted from police cars to shops, and mostly dissipated when it became clear that hatred of the police was complimented by a desire to loot and burn non-political targets. Looting and burning is not the virtue of the left, but instead of neo-liberalism, and we now have a grim mirror image of capitalism’s savaging of our society over the last three decades.

The rioters are a microcosm of the ethics that resulted from that savaging: self-indulgence, competition, and violence. The reason the left should be condemning rather than excusing violence and looting is therefore precisely because it is the structural problem of a society that promotes wretched values. The woman filmed barracking the looters knew this: build something lasting rather than reflexively copy the dominant principles of the society we live in. We should indeed aspire for luxury for all, but it should be through production, not destruction.

The response has at times been terrifying. Demands for the army on the street and shoot to kill policies are hopefully not representative, or else no lesson has been learned from the disaster of Northern Ireland. The only lasting solution is an end to austerity, exclusion and brutality. More than that, we need a functioning, inclusive left rather than the self-interested and chronically romantic one we’ve been lumbered with over the last two decades, or the wing that pointlessly dreams of the return of a mythical Labour Party.

A proper response needs to constructively direct anger where it’s deserved and properly assault the destructive principles inculcated within us: self-interest and self-indulgence even to the point of violence. When youths loot it’s “sheer criminality”, when the rich loot it’s “austerity”. Both are born of the same society, and both need abolishing. We don’t need austerity, and no-one should need to steal.

From the ashes, communities are coming together to defend, reclaim and clean up their streets. Rage may be directed at rioters, but it is also directed at Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson’s tasteless photo-ops. The principles of mutual-aid and respect exist, and they can and will be more powerful than the army, police or any rioters. But they need to remain as our principles in the face of violence from both the rich and the dispossessed. Only through this can we hope to overcome a pathological society; in the words of the anonymous woman from Hackney, “do it for a cause”.

Yet there was an unsurprising absence from the supporters of the strikes and protests: the Labour Party. The party founded to represent the working class, and funded by trade unions for this purpose, has continued with the aggressive union bashing enshrined in principle by Blair and his entourage in 1994. Anyone hoping for any different from “Red Ed” must have finally had those illusions dispersed last week, when he denounced striking workers as wrong.

The complete lack of substance in Miliband and the party’s position was revealed by the embarrassing and illuminating interview in which he repeated his flimsy opposition to the strikes like a schoolboy who has learned something by rote, but does not understand it. He demonstrated the continuation of one of New Labour’s most unedifying traits: the carefully choreographed absence of both meaning and principle.

Yet more than this, it represents a looming disaster for his leadership and his party. According to a YouGov poll, 70% of Labour supporters expressed their backing for the strike. In the same poll, 39% of the population supported the walkout, while a ComRes poll found that 48% of people supported the strikes. Although still a divisive issue, the population was far more supportive of strikes, protests and unions than most of the media allowed.

This is reflected in the fury heaped on Miliband himself. The response to those 70% of Labour supporters who disagreed with him was little more than a note, with an argument not so much non-compelling as non-existent. The disrespect for those on strike and their supporters is revealed in his complete inability and unwillingness to build a case against the strikes. The result, unsurprisingly, was a barrage of comments from Labour Party members and supporters sick of his being a “spineless jerk”.

Fittingly, on the day after the broad-left began to reassert itself Miliband’s pet project, Blue Labour, reared its head. On Friday John Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford wrote an article hazily expounding their desire for a “new patriotism”, the subtext being a patriotism defined not as multicultural but instead specific to the white working class. In their eyes, the working class is a caricature obsessed solely with race, immigration and crime, “abandoned to globalisation” and fearing overwhelming social change. They want a return to the stability and safety of communities that foster “social order, family life and common decency”. The “people” are right wing, and therefore so must the left.

Yet if Labour is out of touch, the core of Blue Labour’s critique, it is not with an automatic conservatism or anti-immigrant sentiment, but instead a desire for progress and increasing anger at the unjust distribution of both wealth and political power in this country. The building momentum against the cuts underlines the invention that we are an inherently conservative and docile country, just as the student protests proved the lie that the youth were stupid and apolitical. On top of the Labour supporters and general public supportive of the strikes, 50% of northerners, the homeland of Blue Labour’s fictitious notion of the working class, agreed that those walking out were right. All of this makes it seem surreal that Miliband is shunning the left in favour of the right.

The problem is not that Labour is not “Blue” enough, but that it is far too blue. What is needed is not more migrant bashing, nor more attacking the unemployed and incapacitated, but instead a progressive movement that can properly represent the country’s workers, no matter their income, skills, location, or ethnicity. People are crying out for Miliband and the party to support them, but they are being ignored in favour of continued submission to the right-wing press’s fantasy view of Britain. Labour will not survive if the left decides that it can do better without it, and the last eight months have proven that a more functional opposition than parliament’s can be found on the streets. If Labour continue on their present course, they may find that opposition finally turns against them, too.

Following the tedious return to a Labour leadership battle last weekend, Ed Miliband sought to underline his uneventful leadership by giving a speech that captured the initiative from the Tories and finally put forward a proposal from the opposition that was coherent and memorable. Last monday morning Frank Field stated that it would be “difficult to overestimate how significant today’s speech is”, and he was right. The speech’s significance was the extent to which it represented not only the continuation of the Blairite legacy but the continuation of a political establishment in which each party blends into the other without a blemish.

The speech began with a blunt attack on welfare recipients. Miliband recounted how he had met a man “with a real injury” who had been on incapacity benefit for a decade. Staggeringly, he went on to conflate this man with the executives of Southern Cross; the exploitation and physical and mental abuse of the elderly is apparently an equal crime to drawing out incapacity benefit. In making this speech, Miliband chose the government’s side in its war with the disabled. Atos healthcare has been given a £300 million contract to quite brazenly strip recipients of incapacity benefit from the welfare budget. With assessors overworked and incompetent, sometimes with no knowledge of problems such as mental illness, and the computer system they use described as a “complete mess” by the designer, the plans are bleakly absurd. A third of “fit to work” decisions are challenged through appeals, with 40% of them successful. The government’s response? Remove the right to appeal, obviously.

By comparing the disabled to the same people who prey on them Miliband’s message – given with no context as to the man’s medical condition – was clear: if he had been on benefits for a decade, he must be a cheat, an assumption that both rests on and reinforces the sort of prejudices that have led to increased attacks on the disabled. More astoundingly, in a period in which unemployment has hit a seventeen year high, Miliband said that “it’s just not right for the country to be supporting him not to work”. His use of the euphemistic and deliberately dishonest term “worklessness” is a syllable from fecklessness. Like Blair, he has adopted the automatic, unthinking tropes of the Daily Mail.

Compared to the gigantic and sustained redistribution of public wealth into the hands of the rich, benefits cheats are nothing. Beyond the £850 billion cost of the bank bailout, there is the persistent refusal of successive governments to deal with the income crisis the rich have forced upon them. Compare the tax gap of £120 billion with the £3.1 billion lost through both fraud and error in the benefits system. The various means of moving wealth from the poor to the rich is not a matter of irresponsibility amongst “wealth creators”, but is instead the brute inclination of the richest in society. Miliband is the leader of the Labour party during the greatest expansion of the divide between rich and poor since the Great Depression, yet his solution is to attack the working class.

This is nothing new. The government who began the incapacity benefit reforms and first gave the contract to Atos was a Labour one. The new assessment system was trialled by Labour and threw up the same faulty assessments. It was Labour’s Baroness Morgan who is both on the Board of Directors for Southern Cross and the chair of Ofsted. It was this shadow cabinet that decided they were “too slow” to commit itself to cuts after the recession set in, and who have since set out to prove they are not “deficit deniers”. Nationally and locally, they have resisted any opportunity to put forward real change.

More sinister is Miliband’s newfound support for voluntarism. The big reveal of his speech – the proposal to base the provision of social housing on whether or not a prospective tenant deserves a place, rather than whether or not they need one – means that people will be rewarded for being “good neighbours”. The position is ludicrous. There is a shameful shortage of social housing in a country where the rates of homelessness are shooting up: the solution is to build more affordable houses, not ration the few that exist to families based on their moral character.

That people “who volunteer, or who work” will be granted housing is further codification of the stigma towards those who are unemployed or on benefits. Who is the moral arbiter in these decisions – those parties who have demonstrated beyond doubt their complete incapacity to govern in the interests of the people, or companies like Atos or Southern Cross who see us merely as commodities?

The purpose of the mission, he told the Scottish Tory conference later that day, was “to end the violence, protect civilians and allow the people of Libya to determine their own future, free from the brutality inflicted by the Gaddafi regime.” It is a brutality no doubt, but as the list of arms exports licensed to Libya over the last eight years reveal, brutality is extremely valuable when commodified. Since the rapprochement with the country following their 2003 decision to no longer develop weapons of mass destruction that climaxed in Tony Blair’s 2005 visit to Gaddafi, deals worth many millions and too numerous to mention have been signed, all available for dissection at the Foreign Office website. The increase in licensing of exports following Blair’s visit is stark, from a meagre £500,000 in 2004 to a £41 million deal in 2005. Nor were these “non-violent” weapons: heavy machine guns, components for tanks, APCs and turrets were shipped to Gaddafi’s regime alongside thermal imaging equipment, gun mountings, radios and fire control systems.

At the same time, Shell signed a deal worth £550 million to explore oil fields off the coast of Libya. Blair’s part of the bargain was not only arming the regime, but also deporting dissident refugees in Britain back to Libya where they faced torture and even death. In 2007, he helped ensure contracts worth £350 million in return for the release of the Lockerbie bomber, famously embrace in Tripoli by the man who ordered the bombing; BP also pushed for the prisoner transfer agreement to go ahead, because it feared delay would negatively affect offshore drilling deals with Gaddafi’s regime. Nor have the Coalition done anything to reverse this. The prisoner transfer accounts for the massive increase in arms deals in 2010, larger than every other year since 2003 put together with £213.2 worth of licenses granted for the first three quarters alone, two of which occurred on Cameron’s watch. Of this £3.2 million was small arms ammunition, used over the last few months to tear Libyans apart across the country. Sniper rifles were also sold; on the day after Cameron’s speeches about protecting civilians, pro-Gaddafi snipers were shooting “whoever they see”.

Neither Labour nor the Coalition can claim that they truly believed Gaddafi had reformed. As leaked US embassy cables reveal, these huge deals took place even though in 2008 the government refused a Libyan request for an export license to deliver 130,000 Kalashnikovs from Ukraine via British company York Guns, denying the license because they were concerned “that the intention may be to re-export the weapons, particularly to armed rebel factions backed by Khartoum and/or Ndjamena in the Chad/Sudan conflict”. As the cable noted, “the fact that York Guns and GOL (Government of Libya) officials have been vague about the intended end-use of the 130,000 Kalashnikov rifles raises…questions about the extent to which Libya is still involved in supplying military materiel to parties involved in the Chad/Sudan conflict.” Despite this suspicion, multi-million pound deals have gone on regardless.

The cables also reveal the extent of corruption that remains within the Libyan economy, with Gaddafi and his children siphoning money wherever it is made, including using the National Oil Corporation, through which any foreign company hoping to exploit Libyan oil must deal, “as a personal bank”. In 2008 the head of the NOC sought to resign, fearing for his life, after Gaddafi’s son Muatassim demanded $1.2 billion in either cash or oil shipments so that he could set up his own private “military/security unit”. Oil money flows not to the Libyan people, but to the Gaddafi family and their allies, and from there to those military units most loyal to the regime, effectively the private armies of Gaddafi and his sons.

It is this murky world that Tony Blair and his two successors propped up. Blair mentioned none of this when he wrote an article in The Times on the weekend the bombing began, in which he referred to “our duty to help people in the Middle East” achieve democracy and human rights. As Cameron said in response to Gaddafi’s declaration of a non-existent ceasefire, actions speak louder than words. His own actions when he toured the Middle East hawking weapons to corrupt and bloodthirsty autocracies reveal that he truly is the “heir to Blair”. With the UK and US now openly talking about arming the rebels, we have to seriously question whether or not those arms will go to the rag-tag guerrillas dressed in football shirts who launched the revolution from the back of pick-up trucks, or the suited and uniformed ex-Gaddafi insiders and former officers whose intentions are not clear and who will no doubt have no problem with maintaining the flow of oil and guns, in a Libya divided by and locked in civil war if needs must. Given their dedicated and lucrative support of Gaddafi as recently as six months ago, can we really trust our government’s claim to humanitarianism?

Dan Jarvis was a Major with a fifteen year career in the Parachute Regiment, the sort of candidate who always used to be associated with the Tories but who has now been welcomed with open arms by Labour. He was also the first person outside of Yorkshire and unconnected with coal mining to be put forward as a Labour candidate in the constituency since 1938. In a bizarre role-reversal, even the Tory candidate could claim a miner for a grandfather.

This was brought about by Labour’s worrying compulsion to shift to the populist right when it comes to parliamentary elections. Their response this year to the British National Party threat in the area was to abandon the strategy used in 2009′s council by-election in the St Helen’s ward – an attack that saw Hope not Hate and Unite Against Fascism, with union backing, take on the BNP with the result that the Labour majority rose. Yet as has been pointed out there is an apparent contradiction when pressing people to vote “anyone but BNP” when that means voting for one of the parties of the status quo that voters are so disillusioned with.

This criticism certainly seems more convincing now that Labour have decided to pander to populism by putting up a candidate impervious to the BNP’s rhetoric of patriotism. Nick Griffin, who had initially planned to stand in the constituency, likely fled because he knew that he’d look like an idiot arguing about patriotism with a veteran. Confused fascists then had to concoct an incoherent argument about why Jarvis wasn’t the sort of hero they had in mind when they used all those pictures of soldiers and Spitfires, and the eventual BNP candidate seemed not to bother with it at all, presenting herself as a simple community organiser.

It is worth questioning whether adopting the patriotic rhetoric of the far-right is a particularly good idea, if effective in the short term. The praise Jarvis won from even the Murdoch press is illustrative of  how his candidacy is a microcosm of the militarism still at Labour’s heart. Jarvis’s selection is part of a campaign led by Jim Murphy, Shadow Secretary of Defence, to get more ex-servicemen on the Labour benches. Since there was only one before Jarvis’s victory, his selection for the seat therefore killed two birds with one stone (or airstrike, perhaps): out-patriot the BNP outside the House of Commons, stop the Tory monopoly on the armed forces within it.

Murphy recently gave a speech about Afghanistan in which, in an amazing piece of logical acrobatics, he tried to present his support for the war as somehow not being pro-war: “the argument is not for war, it is the case against what is unacceptable in the world.” When Ed Milliband visited at the end of January he told troops of “our support, our respect and our admiration for what you are doing for our country”, and emphasised how the parties were “united” behind the war. This was remarkably similar to the core of Jarvis’s rhetoric, where he drew from his army experience to present himself as a natural public servant: “My service to our country will help me to be a strong voice for this constituency.” Labour’s genuine delight at his former career was illustrated when Tom Watson, Jarvis’s campaign manager, gushed over his military experience and, like a schoolboy with a crush, dubbed himself “Sergeant Watson”.

The link between Jarvis’s experience and his ability as a constituency MP is not remotely evident when looked at rationally, but regardless his campaign literature had plenty of photographs of him holding guns and standing in uniform, an Edwardian glorification of a war that has dragged on for a decade and is looking increasingly like one without an end. Worryingly, in his speech Murphy suggested that despite popular anti-war sentiment, “as events in North Africa and the Middle East have shown we cannot afford to duck out of global events”.

The arms and equipment provision to Libya begun by Labour and continued by the coalition (the use of the word “afford” is instructive) shows that the UK and its allies never will duck out of global events. Chillingly, Murphy does not see the current revolts as an indictment of Blair’s legacy – proof that people can overthrow despots on their own, and not with ‘interventions’ that leave millions dead – fearing instead that in the future “we may intervene militarily less quickly, less effectively and with more people than ever saying not at all.” That a party that claims to be social democratic fears a future in which the population continues to express anti-war sentiment seems obscene.

Murphy’s generation (he entered parliament in 1997) is the one that made Labour the war party abroad, and now they try to profit from it at home. This is less crass and offensive than Phil Woolas’s “shit or bust” strategy, when he tried to “make the white folks angry” by spreading lies about his Lib Dem opponents and the Oldham and Saddleworth Asian community during last year’s General Election, yet is still alarming since it accepts a core part of far-right iconography: the heroic and politicised returning soldier. Labour have used the image before, but in 1945 the soldier was a conscripted, working class Private, returning home from an anti-fascist war to the promise of socialism. Now it is a Major returning home from two pointless, bloody wars to a status quo that has no use for progress, optimism or hope. A lot has changed in six decades, and for the worse.

Adopting jingoism means a party that is equally enthusiastic about the cuts ideology can avoid any serious debate with the “natural” working class support that it has steadily abandoned. By conceding to the anti-immigration right, Labour establishes the ground in which the fascist BNP and ultra-Tory UKIP can gain ground. With the three major parties adopting the same economic logic and now the same position on migration and the nation, what hope is there to challenge a rise in the nationalist right?

Until his ejection Woolas only had a majority of 106, and if the Lib Dems were not in an increasingly hated government it would seem impossible that they would not win in a traditionally Liberal region. As it turned out, Labour achieved a better majority and share of the vote than not only last year, but 1997 as well. The coalition result was nothing short of a disaster; at the back of their minds, Lib Dems consoled by a better than expected result must be aware that it was at the cost of thousands of Tory tactical votes, a cannibalisation that incensed the Tory right.

But the first electoral test of the coalition not only underlines the obvious – that people are becoming increasingly hostile towards the coalition – but also, when Labour’s campaign is analysed, that the party has not changed a bit since the tragedy of Blair and the farce of Brown.

The thrust of their campaign in the seat was on law and order, with one leaflet almost entirely devoted to the subject, accusing the coalition being “guilty of going soft on crime” and, reminiscent of Woolas’ murky rhetoric, “guilty of gambling with public safety”. It made much of the “axing of 1,387 police officers” in Greater Manchester, while the sole photo of Ed Millband appeared tucked away in favour of two photos of candidate Debbie Abrahams in front of a poster saying “save our police”.

So much for Miliband’s new found progressive liberalism; this line of attack reeks of New Labour’s Whiggish authoritarianism. Police numbers tend to increase with elections, simply because scaremongering is a brutal and effective tactic. New Labour oversaw a 40% real terms increase in police investment between 1997 and 2007, despite the fact that there has never been any conclusive proof that increased police numbers reduces crime.

The secondary element in Labour’s campaign was tuition fees. Although nominally on the side of students, in reality Labour have no grounds to position themselves with the protestors; not only did they begin the privatisation of university by introducing fees in the first place, but they also propose to introduce the graduate tax, a second income tax attacked by the University and Colleges Union as a simple rebranding of debt, which could end up with teachers paying £17,271, nurses £7,824 and social workers £8,528 more than they do now for their respective courses.

Although Miliband pledged to go on some protests when he was elected, the commitment of the student marches seems to have changed his mind. Attempting to shoot down union militancy, he dismissed strikes as “a sign of failure”, and refused to support the right of workers to strike for political reasons – even though this was not a fight, or even a crisis, that workers started. If workers, the unemployed and youth don’t resist the cuts, who will? Certainly not the shadow cabinet, who recently agreed that labour had been “too slow” to commit itself to cuts after the recession; the opportunity to build a genuine case against the disintegration of welfare and public services was thrown out of the window with this pledge to prove that Labour are not “deficit deniers”, committing the party to New Labour’s fatal addiction: out-Torying the Tories.

Milliband was merely adjusting the message for the audience when he wrote in The Guardian that Labour “must be willing to change” in order to move on from the defeat last May. They have simply not changed; they can score easy victories by attacking the VAT increase, despite the fact that when in power, the cabinet that Miliband was part of twice attempted to increase it. Their law and order campaign in Oldham repeats the worst tendencies of Woolas, their campaigning on the tuition fees rise is disingenuous and hypocritical, and their pro-police attacks on student protestors “violence” will likely foreshadow attacks on the wider anti-cuts movement as it grows.

The left should therefore be wary of celebrating Labour victories, since although they suggest popular support is turning against the government, all of this is for nought if it simply returns New Labour. Without the party’s promised renaissance, a Miliband government would be more of the same, just as Thatcher has returned as Cameron’s spirit guide; “shit or bust” indeed.