Why is England burning?

With all the oxygen that Obama-nalysis is sucking out of the air, I think we're missing a major story — riots by the underclass in England. There's a lot to this, and it's developing (as they say).

First, the latest on the ground. In London (all emphasis mine):

16,000 police to take to streets as Parliament is recalled

The number of police officers on the streets of London is to be almost trebled tonight to 16,000 to deal with the "sickening" scenes of violence ... Parliament will also be recalled for a day on Thursday[.]

And also:

'Mindless violence' spreads to Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham

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.

"Mindless violence."

Here's the latest on the proximate source of the riots, the police killing last week of Mark Duggan (my emphasis):

Fragments of a bullet modified to maximise its destructive power were last night being analysed to cast crucial light on what happened at around 6.15pm last Thursday when police marksmen surrounded the minicab carrying Mark Duggan alongside a north London reservoir and shot him dead. ... Investigators yesterday refused to confirm reports that initial results from the tests by the National Ballistics Intelligence Service suggested that the bullet fragments were from police-issue ammunition, meaning they could not have been from a weapon fired by Mr Duggan and casting doubt on claims that he was killed in an exchange of gunfire.

Well, that sounds familiar. More "mindless violence"?

Now the larger cause, per Howie Klein at DownWithTyranny (I added some paragraphing, since our columns are narrow at Casa AmericaBlog):

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.

As he said he's recalling Parliament-- no doubt to force Labour to embrace his harsh plans for repression-- he muttered something about rebuilding the burning communities... but nothing about the roots causes of the three days of rioting. It surely went beyond one instance of police brutality in the extra-judicial murder of community activist Mark Duggan. That was a spark in Tottenham-- a spark that set off hours of peaceful-- if unreported-- protest.

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 embraceor 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.

Or, as I said a year ago:

When the social contract breaks from above, it breaks from below as well.

That's "mindless violence" on both sides; not purposeless, mind you, but mindless. The rest of Howie's post is excellent as well. (And don't forget to click the wicked video.) He's certainly not alone in his thinking.

The reaction to ugly is almost always ugly. We focus, for example, on the short, brutal years of the guillotine, and somehow forget ten centuries of ugly, brutal, predatory, self-serving abuse of literally millions of souls that spawned that briefer moment.

Or, in more modern terms: Every now and then we get a Cairo. But mostly we get either Libya (blood-ugly on both sides) or Syria (that's the "Bashar al-Assad" reference above). That's what "doing the time" usually looks like if a society decides to "do the crime" of destroying the social contract.

And we're kinda getting there too. Will it be just "Cairo" for us? We should be so lucky. Finding the next FDR — the real one this time — would help an awful lot in that regard.

GP