Please help me understand what the author is arguing in this article about the London...

This article is a classic statement of liberal/left
thinking about the causes of riots and social unrest.

The
article starts with the idea that we must look for the root causes that are truly behind
the rioting.  The author believes that the riots were caused by some sort of societal
ill.  He says that the riots

readability="5">

... should be viewed as a by-product of a much
wider problem.

This is a
classic liberal understanding of how to react to such
events.

The author then goes on to identify this "much
wider problem."  To him, the problem is that the government does not care about people
like the rioters and does not do enough to help them.  This is particularly true in the
current atmosphere of austerity that the Cameron government is creating in England.  The
author tells us that

readability="10">

As long as racism, unemployment, lack of
opportunity, and public service cuts continue to take root, things will only
worsen.

So, we have here an
article that argues that the riots were caused by the larger society's attitudes towards
the poor and the fact that it does not do enough to try to help this group of
people.