Chris, thanks for your concern.
Luckily we live way out in the country where the crime rate is quite low and to see a 'non-white' face is still something of a rarity. And is does seem that most (but not all) of this trouble is being caused by 'disaffected' black youths. My daughter works in central London and lives in Finsbury Park an area of high Turkish/Asian immigration rather than W Indian. She has been OK but several of her work colleagues have been unable either to get home/into work because of police 'cordons'.
A lunch time phone-in prog. on BBC radio discussed everything from 'hangum/flogum', to giving more power to the over-cautious police, using the Army (most of them in Afghanistan and other hot-stops), introducing water-cannon, despite impracticality in narrow city streets, to 'understanding' kids from drug-ridden, fatherless homes and even providing therapy to help mothers with a lack of parenting skills.
A woman even spoke of a restaurant in a well-heeled area where all the customers were robbed as they sat at their tables.
In the short-term it seems that bored kids, using the latest technology (phones/texts etc) are orchestrating a spree of looting/burning and general mayhem. This is being followed by an older crowd of 'free-shoppers' helping themselves to goods, computers, booze; anything they can lay their hands on. They are not scared of the police and have NO respect for the law and realise few will be arrested or charged.
The saddest reports were from the small shop-keepers, many of them immigrants themselves, who have been unable to save their properties and life-work.

Thanks for the response, Vee. The news is heartbreaking, but I've learned to question what the media reports.

Hope your daughter remains safe.

Thanks for your concern, friends. I'm in Wales, not England, but it has reached here as far as the Big City, Cardiff. - about 40 miles away. We live in a biggish village near Swansea and there's a festival here next weekend so I"m a bit apprehensive about the possibility of things getting out of control. Kids on bicycles are certainly wheeling around excitedly; 'hoodies' are seen on the street but keep fingers crossed, so far.

I think the unrest goes back a couple of generations or more and has just grown. There is great unemployment on a national scale - there are young people in their 20s who have never held a job for instance. Hence, there is a lot of poverty. There is a lot of bad parenting; single parents of mothers who cannot control their sons or instill in them a sense of right and wrong. There is, of course, Testosterone, always a problem unless you harness energies of young boys and men. Haven't time to go on.

Thanks, Vee, for your clear analysis. And I hope Clare is OK. (If Stan were here now he would be deeply upset by it all).

Dido

*SIGH*

The world is in a ridiculous state.

Over at the Hot Topics Gardenwebs Forum, we have two excellent threads on this subject going, with contributors from the UK.

This may sound silly under the circumstances, but is it cold in the U.K.? Every news film I see shows people wearing coats and scarves. (Of course the police are always heavily dressed in these situations.)

Siobhan, it probably seems cold by US standards as we are having a 'typical' summer . . .some sun with temps in the low 60's, lots of cloud and heavy rain in the north, especially Scotland (hence lack of riots there).
Above Dido makes the point about the poverty in some of our inner cities and she is obviously correct although these disadvantaged kids/young people and their parents are heavily 'propped-up' by the State (ie the tax payer). Every mother gets child allowance and a place in a nursery for so many hours a week for pre-school kids. Low income families receive free school meals and of course, all out health care is free. Many of them will live in 'social housing' and pay little or no rent.
What so many of these disaffected people seem to suffer from is poverty of ambition. They and their parents have no interest in school and school has only slight interest in them, they have little concern about getting a job as the State will provide for them, many of their parents, even grandparents have never worked yet are masters at working the benefit system.
Of course this is a generalisation and there are people from these communities who do get on and make something of their lives.
I have looked at the 'Britain Burns' thread at 'Hot Topics' and see the guy 'Campanula' who has started it has some very strong views on many aspects of this debate. Of course he is quite at liberty to express these thoughts as am I to disagree with his ideas on our 'brutal' police force and his evident hostility towards any privately educated politicians. Nor do I agree with a 'creative campaign of civil disobedience'.
I haven't been able to find any other comments from English posters. We are probably too busy watching out brand new flat screen TV's . . which we bought from man in the pub for 20 pounds.

Alas, this is something that no one has figured out - how to balance the needs of single mums, children, the unemployed - without enabling dependence on the welfare system and creating a whole new socio-economic group. I certainly don't have any answers. It seems to me that somehow aid has to be geared towards giving people a hand and becoming a productive member of society. How to do this, I haven't a clue!

I have no answers either, but I am (and have been and will forever be) in the middle of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and find myself distressed to recognize certain trends and conditions. Gibbon seems to emphasize the cultural decline.