Why is England burning?

Americablog has some good background, including:

Embattled police struggled to contain a third night of riots, looting and arson as David Cameron cut short his holiday to chair a session of Cobra, the emergency co-ordination committee, scheduled for this morning.

As darkness drew in last night violence broke out in so many parts of London that it began to read like an A to Z of the capital. Peckham, Ladbroke Grove, Ealing, Catford, Chalk Farm, East Dulwich, Bethnal Green, Lewisham, Clapham and Croydon – where one person was shot and wounded – were all affected. In Hackney police fought for much of the day with rioters who hurled shopping trolleys, bins and pieces of concrete at officers, and set fire to vehicles.

And:

Didn't David Cameron looked pissed off having been dragged back to gritty, sweltering, seething, burning London from his lovely £10,000/week 18th Century Tuscan holiday villa near Montevarchi!

His answer to the rioters who have spread from Tottenham to almost every corner of London and up to Birmingham and Liverpool is one dimensional: he's going to go all Bashar al-Assad on them. Tonight the police on the streets of London will increase from 6,000 to 16,000.

And:

But the conflagration that followed, there and beyond, has much more to do with a breakdown of social cohesion in the U.K. There's a hopelessness brought on by Cameron's enthusiastic buy-in to world capital's insistence on an Austerity Regime. Cameron was the first major embrace or of the concept, a concept that the GOP feels will serve their nefarious purposes here in the U.S. as well, regardless of how disastrously it has failed-- in every way-- in the U.K.

Washington's Blog has more:

CNBC: British Riots - And Unrest Worldwide - Caused By "Economic Uncertainty"

While most mainstream news outlets are blaming the British riots on random thuggery, they are really an outgrowth of bad economic conditions and governments' poor response to the financial crisis.

As I've noted for years, raging inequality and policies which help the big boys at the expense of the "little people" are causing unrest - not just in Egypt - but worldwide.

London and UK riots: live  The Telegraph UK. 

 

Technology is having a distinct impact on today's modern rioters..

 

Rupert's Crisis Expands, Deepens..

Carl Bernstein: Closing News of the World is Murdoch’s Watergate–just the beginning of the "seismic event"  From Americablog

Writing in Newsweek, Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) says that the closing of the scandal-ridden scandal-rag News of the World is the start of the crumbling of the Murdoch world-wide empire.
..
[T]he empire is shaking, and there’s no telling when it will stop. My conversations with British journalists and politicians—all of them insistent on speaking anonymously to protect themselves from retribution by the still-enormously powerful mogul—make evident that the shuttering of News of the World, and the official inquiries announced by the British government, are the beginning, not the end, of the seismic event.
..
“In the end, what you sow is what you reap,” said this same executive. “Now Murdoch is a victim of the culture that he created. It is a logical conclusion, and it is his people at the top who encouraged lawbreaking and hacking phones and condoned it.”
And:
Investigators are already assembling voluminous records that demonstrate the systemic lawbreaking at News of the World, and Scotland Yard seems to believe what was happening in the newsroom was endemic at the highest levels at the paper and evident within the corporate structure. Checks have been found showing tens of thousands of dollars of payments at a time.

As the scandal and its implications become clearer, you'll see more reports like this..