The recent riots in English urban areas and in Northern Ireland were precipitated by racism,
extremist nationalism and religious bigotry. That’s what everybody sees, and everyone is
responding to. However, the unseen underlying cause of such attitudes and behaviour is
chronic economic insecurity, just as lurches to the far right in other countries have been due
to economic insecurity and the growth of the new mass class, the precariat, whose lives are
mired in insecurity, instability, precarity and debt. When people are insecure, it’s easy to
induce them to believe the lie that other vulnerable groups are to blame for their precarity.
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