Clarification:
Politics
The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.
When you have the "let them eat cake" attitude in government, when those rioting feel excluded from the communities they live in to such an extent they are willing to burn their own community; the root cause is in policy.
If it was only greed and willingness to to do maximum damage why do the not move to the richer parts of the city and burn Bentley's and loot Harrod's for Jimmy Choo shoes? Why in France whenever we have riots in "La cité" do they burn their neighbors cars? Why do they loot their local shops, it is not a question of convenience but one of not belonging.
The end results may well be mindless violence as the popular reasoning goes but the root cause is direct and deliberate policy.
The cries of they are "just bad people" are as equally mindless as the riots themselves; since if they are indeed bad [a premise I do not hold] there must also be a fundamental reason for their badness. The French Aristocrats had the same reasoning when faced with the French revolution. I wouldn't call the riots in England an uprising just yet, they are more symptomatic of poor social and economic policy. When you have large numbers of unemployed; especially the young and the sense of exclusion pervasive then you have a flash point. Once this sense of injustice and economic exclusion builds to a certain level then you have a riot, but you must have pushed hard to reach this point.
There is nothing new nor surprising about riots they have occurred throughout history and will keep on occurring since the lessons have not been learnt. Wear down and exclude from society in general large groups of people and riots will occur couple that with blatant targeting of some groups by race, religion and economic status and you add more fuel to the fire. When you group people into essentially economic ghettos [projects, social housing] with unemployment at times near universal you deliberately remove a sense of belonging to the society as a whole. It has been argued for decades that creating these separate slums [call them what you will] is socially irresponsible, and when politicians and their pet journalists throw up their hands and essentially say: "Who knew", one can only laugh bitterly and call them irresponsible idiots.
You can condemn violence [I do, both the social and governmental forms] but you must look at the root cause. When you policies hurt preferentially those with little to lose you can drive them over the edge. There is a reason that people will burn their own community it is because they have no sense nor are a part of that community, and it all stems from a politics of choice. Exclude enough people from the current system and eventually the system itself will fall, it is called revolution. The extreme right has been profiting for the last few decades by giving the "excluded" refuge and a sense of belonging, I expect their popularity to only increase.
Let them eat cake is bad politics.
Tue Aug 09, 2011 at 11:11 PM PT: The title has been changed to exclude sports related violence which tends to be of short duration and the reasons less clear.