“There will be rioting in the streets”.

So several colleagues have told me over the past year, asked about the UK’s economic prospects and likely civic mood in the face of deficit reduction policy.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s spending cuts ‘revelations’, unrest in the streets doesn’t seem at all far-fetched. We’ll doubtless see more protest marches, novelty placards and bawdy papier mache effigies of members of the coalition Government adorning urban areas over the coming months.

Not really a riot though it it? The French tend to make more of an impact to the point that it’s virtually a central thread of national pride. Bangkok’s big protest became a tragedy earlier in the year.

The three-day week era in the late 1970s and the miners’ strike of the 1980s produced defining images of those decades in the UK media. But the actual riots of note were Brixton and Toxteth, and generally accepted to be caused by tensions between communities and the police rather than employment and policy issues per se.

Besides, I am not convinced that protests in the streets will really cut it in the internet age. The implicit threat of ‘I’m going to stand in the square adorned in neon chanting for a media that is already a bit bored of this’ doesn’t really compare with the influence over opinion that can be created online. In the 70s and 80s, protests and, to a degree probably, riots were about making a highly visible statement to the general public through mass conventional media. I saw this first hand when I was one of the ‘women’ who formed a human chain around the Greenham Common air base in 1983 – everything was about catching the camera’s eye. While I’m sure activists and aggrieved workers will co-ordinate their message delivery across conventional and digital media, you have to wonder whether taking to the streets is really worth the effort compared to time spent at a keyboard using social media to garner support.

Multiple ‘in the streets’ non-violent protests runs the risk of news saturation, and so less prime-time exposure. There are only so many times you can make a chanting crowd look interesting on the screen or sound menacing on the radio.

But if it does get a bit messy out there, at least expect some slick PR from the police: there’s nothing like the threat of tear gas and petrol bombs disrupting a Saturday morning High Street stroll to help build a case for sustained manpower.

And if the UK does turn to ‘French-style protests‘, perhaps we’ll at least try to do it properly, with striped jumpers, berets, utter nonchalance and the occasional break for a pastis.