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@Oliver Schick
My views on this are roughly as follows:
(1) To suggest it's 'pure criminality' is bullshit. Of course thousands and thousands of criminal offences are being committed, but the massing of offences is such that anyone who still thinks that this is not evidence of serious underlying social problems is an idiot.
(2) Blame whom you wish to blame for the 'serious underlying social problems'. There are undeniable wide divides in 'society' (and you always have to add 'whatever that currently means'), and it is unlikely that only one side of the divide is to blame. One may be more to blame than the other, but does it really matter? We're all in this together, aren't we? (http://www.lfgss.com/thread59345.html)
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camila_Batmanghelidjh talks a lot of sense. She is like a modern Socrates in some of what she says. If you compare the relationship of the Government to an abusive family relationship, you find an astonishing number of parallels. Many abused children become abusive themselves. That's not an 'excuse', just a statement of fact. If you promote a 'dog eat dog' society, you will only get an echo back of what you may be doing at a posher level, and what exactly that is could fill lots of books.
(4) On the technology angle, I do not like this tendency of fitting everybody out with their own personal computer which they're constantly supposed to have on them on the move. I have no idea if that BlackBerry network really worsened the riots, but as it's a particular bugbear of mine, I'll just insist that it did without having any evidence.