The Riots - Are We Missing Something?

It's hard to believe that a week ago today, we thought Britain was descending into anarchy. The Sun newspaper, last Tuesday, was actually entertaining the idea of using live rounds on rioters. Now, in the aftermath, our political leaders are at loggerheads about how to prevent it happening again. Everyone knows about this, but those who don't, can see the competing arguments of Cameron and Miliband HERE.
Actually, I think this discussion to be a worthwhile idea, and don't want to sound negative about it. From the far political Right to Left, a plethora of explanations and remedies are being explored and touted.
What concerns me is the fact that one very important aspect is being ignored or forgotten. The underlying economic situation, which "everyone knows about", is being left out of the equation. The inescapable truth is that there are simply not enough jobs for young people, and particularly the young people from whom the ranks of the rioters are drawn.
In sociological terms, most of the rioters (not all) come from what we used to call "the unskilled working class". That's when there was work for them, I mean. In 1966, 50% of the UK workforce worked in manufacturing industry; today, the percentage is only 14%. When Mrs Thatcher, with her monetarist fiscal "reforms", practically destroyed British industry in the 1980s, tens of thousands of people found themselves on the scrap heap in Mrs Thatcher's Brave New Britain. The unskilled sector, the people who had done the routine jobs in the factories, were particularly hard hit. Lacking the skills, education (and, let's face it,the will) to adapt to the new service economy, they, and the areas they lived in, stagnated. A new expression was coined - instead of the unskilled working class, the talk was of "the underclass" (an expression revived last week). Many of the youth of this class, as we know, drifted into gangs who blighted their local neighbourhoods in various ways.
I get the impression that our political leaders were happy to live with the problem - provided the gangs stayed out of sight on their "turfs". What no-one expected was for these gangs to bury their differences and go on the rampage, as they did last week. Suddenly - ooops! - we have a major problem to deal with.
The solutions being mooted at the moment, as far as I understand them, are of the "sticking-plaster" or punitive kind: parenting classes; sports training; citizenship education; ending benefit payments - even evictions.
The problem I have with these measures is that they simply will not work if these youths are not placed in well-paid, worthy jobs. What is the point of doing an 8 week course in citizenship (or anything else) if you just end up back on the dole? This idea was tried in the 80s (Who remembers YOPs?)It failed then, and will fail again. I wish I could say that I have the answer, but I haven't. The only idea that occurs to me is to increase the benefits payments to these youths massively - but that would be politically unacceptable.