The recent riots couldn’t have happened at a better time for Owen Jones.

The new author has suddenly found himself catapulted onto our TV screens and radios as the defender of the ‘feral underclass’, challenging the racist David Starkey on Newsnight and arguing with pompous Peter Hitchens on Jeremy Vine.

Even if the timing is fortuitous, the exposure is not because Jones’s important book does a good job of explaining (“Explaining,” he became tired of saying during his media interviews, “is not the same as excusing”) how so many people have become so disenfranchised.

It all began, he contends, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives systematically set about dismantling industry and trade unions, destroying the social support mechanisms of working class communities at the same time as telling them to aspire to become middle class.

‘Aspire’ is a dirty word for Jones because the central tenet in his book is that a perceived lack of aspiration among the working class is used by the ruling class to shift the blame from government to individuals.

If it’s chavs’ fault they can’t climb the ladder (“because they’re smelly, thick, racist and rude by nature”), it’s not our fault as a society, even though we pulled up the ladder up behind us, he surmises.

Chavs is a meticulously-researched, perceptive and occasionally witty book that documents how the ruling class have abandoned the working class to its fate, using chav-hatred as a smokescreen to excuse hereditary inequality.

But Jones offers solutions too: he believes trade unions should work together to change the balance of power, campaigning against the cuts and for fairness in employment.

After all, if we want people to have aspirations, shouldn’t we give them something to aspire to other than life on the dole?

* Chavs, the Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones is published by Verso Books. You can buy a copy at bookmarksbookshop.co.uk

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