CLASS politics. Easy to invoke, sometimes challenging to apply.

No fewer than four separate opinion surveys in the last fortnight have brought this home.

The first, the work of the Children’s Commissioner, found that working-class youth involved in last summer’s anti-migrant riots were largely animated not by racism but by hatred of the police and frustration at lack of opportunities.

The second, for Channel Four, made headlines with its claim that most 13- to 27-year-olds believed Britian would be better governed by a strong leader unconstrained by parliament or elections.

The third established that voters across major democracies want change but have fast-diminishing faith in the mainstream parties of liberal centrism to deliver it.  Thank the Tony Blair Institute for that insight.

And the last, commissioned by Hope not Hate, every Israel supporter’s favourite anti-fascists, warned that Reform could win as many as 60 Labour seats if a general election were to be held now.

Start with the young workers involved in the riots after the Southport murders. That these were racist incidents is undeniable.  

And some of their leaders have proved, upon court appearances, to be individuals with long histories of fascist violence and intrigue.

Yet Rachel De Souza found that racism was not on the minds of the youths involved. In fact, their motivations were starkly similar to the riots in London in 2011, and all over the place in the 1980s — antipathy to the police.

That is hardly surprising. Working class youth are the section of society most heavily policed, in all senses, black youth especially so.

They are rightly identified as potentially the most energetic, and alienated, force for social disorder and even revolution. 

Thus they are corralled, coerced, cajoled, restricted, pushed, pulled and generally over-supervised the moment they step out of their homes to engage in any form of social activity, from picketing to attending a football match. 

The police are the main, if far from the only, agency of this regime, embroiled in a daily struggle to ensure that working-class youth are kept in a tight grip until they can be regarded as viable citizens of bourgeois society.

Distrust of the police is more or less universal among the young working class. Deprivation, a functional consequence of the property and power relations the police maintain, compounds the anger.

So there is an element that will seize any chance to express their sentiments with whatever comes to hand. It is a mindset ripe for unscrupulous manipulation, but also entirely understandable.

That some followed a lead given by hardened racist agitators is certainly a blunder on their account. Yet since Dame Rachel found that they were neither driven by “far-right, anti-immigration or racist views” nor by online misinformation, perhaps the larger criticism should be aimed at a politics which has left them abandoned.

Assume that within the 52 per cent supporting authoritarianism in the second survey, where respondents were not classified by social class, you would find most of those working-class youth who confronted the police last summer.

It seems a paradox that some chuck stones at the most obvious symbols of state authority available while also urging a regime which would extend that authority without any democratic restraint.

They protest for the smashing of the state (most literally), or that element of it in immediate view, and at the same time for the unbounded exercise of its prerogatives, even if those are terms they would not recognise.

Unfortunately, some have time to ponder the paradox at His Majesty’s pleasure following Starmer’s direction of condign punishment.

That has been the governing attitude towards even the slightest working-class transgression in a collective and aggressive form, even if the collective is ad hoc and the aggression inchoate, for as long as there has been a modern proletariat. 

Here, Starmer stands with Lord Liverpool — who was also keen on Treasury orthodoxy, austerity included and tax rises not, come to that.

Media reports of this youthful desire for dictatorship have universally assumed that it is a demand for some form of turbocharged Trumpism. 

Maybe many respondents may have a right-wing populist type in mind. They are, after all, making most of the running. 

But the problems such a government would be called upon to address — deteriorating living standards, eviscerated public services, dead-end jobs, an absence of housing and opportunity — are ones to which Farageism offers no plausible solutions at all.

Yet it is Farage who, as per police-friendly Hope not Hate, is set to scoop the political winnings. 

The same survey indicated, however, that many potential Reform voters were positive about immigration and in favour of a strong state economically. So why vote for a migrant-baiting Thatcherite?

The reason must be that Reform represents a potent illusion of change, whereas Starmer thought it sufficient to put the word on a billboard while on his way to a free suit-fitting courtesy of Lord Alli.

The Tony Blair Institute, no surprise here, believes that the answer is more competent management. In his way, Blair seems as doubtful about the merits of democracy as the disenchanted young, long preferring technocracy unbound, a sort of perpetual Platonic rule, with himself, of course, among the elect who wouldn’t require actual election.

His answer, in the report accompanying the multi-state survey, poses the Leninist question: “What is to be done?

“Is there an alternative that neither defends a crumbling status quo nor succumbs to the divisive simplicities of angry insurgency? Across much of the democratic world, many millions of voters feel they live in broken societies that urgently need to be repaired.”

So true. At another moment it would be fruitful to trace the sources of the crumbling of the status quo, which has so richly rewarded Blair. It may well be found in the high days of charisma-centrism, of Clinton, Blair and Obama; before the brand reduced to Starmer and Biden.

But for now, let’s consider his take on the problem:

“In the main it is not the ideology of mainstream politicians that growing numbers of voters deplore — but their competence and integrity.” 

Left and right are outmoded and irrelevant categories, he inevitably argues, a statement which is without exception the mark of a political huckster or, more concretely, a faux-socialist tiptoeing towards the embrace of the Lady Londonderrys.

Let’s allow that honesty and competence among politicians seem about as rare as clean British rivers or Donald Trump apologies. Still, those sterling qualities are not a political programme.

If Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves bought their own clothes and knew what they were about amidst all their five missions, six steps, five milestones and whatever, the disillusioned young workers would remain just as angry, all other fiscal rules and deregulatory initiatives being equal.

Traditional solutions for rioting young workers remain available.  Channelling the Duke of Wellington, who called his soldiers “the scum of the earth,” the outgoing head of the British army General Patrick Sanders recently offered this reflection on the troops he commanded: “British soldiers are often scrawny, ill-educated and underprivileged.

“But they have a nobility of spirit, a streak of cheerful and irrepressible defiance, a joyful wildness and above all a capacity for sudden violence.”

For more than two centuries, the British state has been exporting joyful wildness around the globe. The capacity for “sudden violence” remains to hand and, unappreciated as it is by the police, army uniforms are an acceptable garb for it. More Iraqs await. That is ruling-class politics.

When one third of Channels Four’s surveyed youth said they would like the army to be in charge perhaps they were envisaging the dictatorship of the scrawny underprivileged rather than General Sanders. That would be working-class politics, and more likely to produce an exit from the current malaise.

Not so unlikely. Take it from an insightful Telegraph column by Sam Ashworth-Hayes: “If liberal democratic capitalism is prone to gridlock, then something less liberal and less democratic might be preferred. That might look something like support for a strong American-style head of government, and admiration for Donald Trump’s wave of executive orders.

“It might look like another wave of support for a Jeremy Corbyn-like figure, pledging a wave of nationalisations and council homes. Or it might look more radical altogether.”

Corbyn, never mind more radical options, would be more democratic than the present dystopia, not less. That, not Farage’s boozy Bonapartism, is the change that is needed — the self-empowerment of those presently reduced to lobbing bricks at cops.