A last stretch of this strange, uneasy summer remains. Between now and September, there could conceivably be further outbreaks of the kind of violence that rightwing politicians and their media allies have been frantically predicting. But for now, behold a fascinating spectacle: a country quietly refusing to chaotically combust, despite being endlessly encouraged to do so.

One word in particular symbolises the gap between hyped-up rhetoric and everyday reality. “Tinderbox” was first used in the mid-16th century, to describe a crude instrument for starting fires: a container that carried a piece of either flint or steel, and a pocketful of the dry, flammable material that gave the device its name. With the invention of matches, the use of such implements fell away, and the word began its passage to how it is used today: as political shorthand for any situation supposedly on the brink of explosion. And here we are: over the past few weeks, “tinderbox” has become an inescapable cliche.

At the end of July, the Institute for Public Policy Research published a report to mark the first anniversary of 2024’s riots, which claimed that the loss of communities’ shared spaces – pubs, youth clubs, community centres – can create “tinderbox conditions for violence”. At around the same time, the protests and violence outside hotels used for people seeking asylum began to attract the self-same description. “We need an emergency cross-party cabinet to stop tinderbox Britain exploding,” wrote a columnist in the Daily Telegraph. The former home secretary Sajid Javid warned that the UK is “sitting on a tinderbox of disconnection and division”. And not long after, his one-time colleague Robert Jenrick – now the shadow justice secretary, and a man on constant manoeuvres – told the Today programme that “the country is like a tinderbox right now”.

All this noise is part of a much bigger political development: a ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown. Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the........

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