In 1967 Martin Luther King gave a speech called The Other America in which he set out the reason for riots. King argued that riots do not develop out of thin air but are caused by certain “intolerable social conditions”. In the final analysis, he said, disorder is a consequence not only of irresponsibility, but inequality.

In some ways that explains the 2011 riots in England too. At the time I called them an “uprising of the working class” and I stick to that assessment today. The riots were brought about not only by irresponsibility, but also inequality: by a sense of revulsion at denied opportunity, poverty and injustice. England is one of the richest countries on earth, but it is also one of the most polarised.

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Away from the towers that soar above the City of London, there is another England. It is an ugly place. In this England, a million young people have their hopes blasted every day. In this England, thousands of work-starved youngsters search for jobs that do not exist. In this England, legions of kids find themselves crowded into sink estates that tower over streets absent of power and absent of hope. They are the England left behind by globalisation. And they are the England who, in 2011, took to the streets and smashed up their neighbourhoods.

Take a look at most riots in the 20th century: the one underlying similarity is unemployment and poverty among people who are keenly aware of the sharp inequality between themselves and their country’s wealthy elite. Distracted by the flames and the looting, many of us easily forgot that riots are almost always protests against social conditions that have become intolerable. In the panic of 2011, however, the majority of us swept any rational explanation of the disorder under the carpet and swallowed up simplistic lies. Consumerism. Greed. New tracksuits. New trainers. We missed an opportunity to do something constructive about the great social crisis of our time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A building burns in Tottenham, north London, during the 2011 riots. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

When recklessness and greed shattered the economy in 2008, young people were destroyed. Those aged between 18 and 24 have accounted for almost 30% of the total rise in the unemployment rate brought about by the “great recession”. As a consequence, by the time 2011 arrived the UK was marked by the most unequal distribution of wealth and income since the 1930s. Inequality, unemployment, and absolute powerlessness had become the dominant issues facing England’s young. As millions were slashed from youth services, troubled experts started making stark predictions, falling over themselves to warn how Britain’s young people were in danger of becoming a “lost generation”.

The Police Federation summoned the home secretary, Theresa May, to conference and warned her to prepare for unrest. From the beginning of the financial crisis, we lost businesses and banks, and it seemed we were losing an entire generation. So when disorder fired up in Tottenham, north London, that summer, no one should have been surprised when that “Other England” rose up in revolt.

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The argument is certainly not that material hardship necessarily leads to unruly behaviour. The vast majority of youngsters affected by the crisis behaved like responsible citizens and stayed at home when trouble flared. But since we know that inequality and resentment against the authorities are always factors in a riot, why should it have been any different this time around? The prizewinning Reading The Riots report, put together by the Guardian, supports this idea – that most people who took part in 2011’s disorder were part of this “lost generation” of the young: kids from the poorest families, from the most hopeless places. The Other England.

Britons today remain beset by complex, intractable problems: technological change displaces workers; globalisation destabilises communities; family structures are disintegrating.

But for the young there is all this and worse. Ostensibly, the youth unemployment rate has improved since 2011, but in reality it is nowhere near pre-crisis levels and stagnates at a staggering 18% – more than three times the rate for adults. Social mobility for the young has ground to a halt. The housing crisis singles out young adults for extra punishment. Young people’s faith in politics has evaporated. The government, they say, is in the pocket of the rich. The economy, they say, is rigged. It seems eminently reasonable to ask the question: how long before it all kicks off again?

Far from disappearing, the ranks of that ugly Other England, where the riots have their roots, have been swelling. With inequality spiralling out of control and more than a million 16- to 24-year-olds with neither work nor full-time education, the economic exclusion of the young is a crisis that policymakers can no longer afford to ignore. Instead of carrying the miserable burden of mass unemployment, instead of watching the crumbling of our education system, instead of allowing our society to become diminished by the violence and dishonesty of crime, we must start to put our energies into building strong communities capable of providing security and prosperity for every citizen.

In the aftermath of 2011 we had a chance to put our heads together, to use the riots to help think of ways to repair our world. How maddening that we chose to put our heads in the sand.