Just days before the Tottenham fire that set alight petrol lakes of the inequality and hopelessness that exists right across the UK, a meticulously coiffured tour guide in Cairo (even his eyelashes appeared sculpted), surely from a respectable middle class family, told me that the poor people of Egypt were generally happy with their lot, and, ignoring the contradiction, in the same breath explained how Mubarak lost his way by not spreading the wealth that the rich were harvesting as a direct result of his neo-liberal economic reforms. Despite my guide’s faulty reasoning he had exposed the connection between economic and social injustice and the revolt against tyranny — the self-same inequality and lack of control experienced by large numbers of people in Britain.