Britain: "Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness ... "

She's writing about London, not America ... right? After all, the richest Americans are better off than the poorest to a greater factor than 100, aren't they?

There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored, by Nina Power (Guardian).

... Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.