Down and Out Riots

By coincidence I'd just finished reading Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London when I heard part of a broadcast on Radio 4 (BBC) on the very same work. Though his novels Animal Farm and 1984 are better known nowadays, his journalism remains largely forgotten, apart from Shooting An Elephant, which is often anthologised. In the first part of Down and Out he describes his life as a plongeur, a dishwasher in a French restaurant. He describes all the fraud that goes on behind the scenes of fancy restaurants. In the second part he describes his experiences as a homeless man in London, being moved from dosshouse to dosshouse. Generally the plongeur, despite the harsh working conditions and the low pay, is better off than the tramp. Right about the time I finished it riots broke out in Tottenham.

In Down and Out Orwell contends capitalist society fears the mob so much they won't leave people idle. The tramps have to work for their stay in de dosshouse. His suggestion was to give people money and let them pass the time as they saw fit. However, later in the book he points out how resentful and humiliated people feel at being
given handouts.

From the Industrial Revolution onward, one problem with capitalist society has been that once food became more available the population would surpass the needs of industry.
Colonies providing cheap raw materials and later the welfare state tended to mitigate this problem. So the idea among (social) democracies was to provide basic services and a small income for these "superfluous" people. They ignored the resentment this caused among the recipients who felt excluded from society, and the taxpayers who felt they were being robbed. The latter won't cause that much trouble because they have more to lose. Resentment among the former, however, is free to boil over at times.

The only option would be to make young, unemployed people work for their handout, but this would have unpleasant echoes of slavery and Russian gulags.