[Amy]

Plenty communities are armed to the teeth and fighting when necessary to defend themselves (Often ironically, the much maligned immigrant communities. Certainly I've seen lines of sword-bearing Sikhs positioning themselves to defend the usually quite mixed-race poor neighbourhoods that some of this violence is damaging).

This rioting is rooted in deeper social and economic problems affecting the country. A large proportion of the country's youth feel (Correctly) that they have no real future prospects, after this current government (As with the previous conservative government in the 1980s) has stripped social programmes of funding, slowed economic growth to almost nothing with massive sweeping budget cuts, and has cut off higher education to all but the richest of the population.

When you have one of the highest economic disparities between rich and poor in most of europe (though still NOWHERE near as bad as the US) and then compound the situation of an entire generation who feel (And often quite rightly so) that they have nothing at all to lose, with increasingly aggressive behaviour of police, themselves stressed to breaking point by massive budget cuts, and layoffs, all wondering if their jobs will be the next ones to arbitrarily be dropped, you have a powderkeg, and a lit fuse.

Interestingly, the more northern areas (We consider regions like Manchester to be "the south" even if they think of themselves as "north") have not seen rioting this time around. This seems largely due to our part of the country already having an "us vs them" mentality of hatred towards London, which we see as more of an invading foreign power, and having an almost nationalistic pride in our shared identity and in our cities, rather than nihilistically seeing no value at all in anything.