London's burning, London's burning, all across the town, all across the night ... So sang The Clash in their song of the late-1970s, foreshadowing the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981 and, three decades later, the looting and burning that has turned the British summer of 2011 into a social and policing nightmare.
It is a reminder that for all the work in community relations and policing, poverty alleviation and employment initiatives, the inner cities of the United Kingdom have remained vulnerable to unrest in the intervening decades.
If the scale and brazenness of the lawlessness shocks, so too does its spread from its initial site in Tottenham, in northeast London, across the city to other urban centres - Bristol and Gloucester to the southwest, Birmingham and Wolverhampton in the Midlands, and Liverpool and Manchester to the northwest.
Amid the flames, the fear and the struggle for control of the streets is the resounding question of "Why?"; "Why now?" is perhaps an easier question to answer.
Ostensibly the riots had their beginning at the weekend in the death of a young black man in Tottenham shot dead in an altercation with the police. Demonstrations, mustered by cellphone and social networking, erupted into near-riots and dangerous, incendiary clashes with the police.
Cars were stoned, buildings set alight, retailers looted. It is almost as if the urban disaffected waited until the "grown-ups" had gone away, slipped the country for their summer holidays, to unleash their aggression and violence: London Mayor Boris Johnson to the United States, Home Secretary Theresa May to Switzerland, Prime Minister David Cameron to tennis lessons in Tuscany.
They have all, despite an initial reluctance, returned to face the music, and while they are united in their vociferous condemnation of the lawlessness and criminality - as they should be - even the most forthright among them appears to recognise there is more to this crisis than a mob incited by a handful of criminals.
The death of Mark Duggan in the police shooting incident in Tottenham ignited a social conflagration and the search for answers now begins in earnest.
In the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots, a subsequent high-level report - written by Lord Scarman - concluded the violence and unrest were "essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police".
There was plenty of evidence to support such conclusions then but in the interim a great deal of effort and work has been done to alleviate this problem.
There may still be some distance to go in achieving the best of possible relationships between the police and the restless and bored youth of Britain's inner cities, but it is highly unlikely that a similar report conducted now would come to the same conclusions.
While there are undoubtedly rafts of anti-authoritarian antagonism and sheer criminality, the bigger picture will include factors such as endemic poverty, unemployment, targeted cuts and general social deprivation - to which one British MP referred as a "toxic mix".
Criminologist and youth culture expert Professor John Pitts reaches broader still. He told the Guardian newspaper earlier this week that "Many of the people involved are likely to have come from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have a legitimate future."
They did not have a stake in conformity and the things that normally constrained people were not there. There was, he said, "a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose".
The sight of the violence and unrest turning inner-city England into an urban battlefield raises issues for lawmakers, social agencies and politicians in this country.
Disenfranchise large pockets of the population, cut them off from the possibilities available to the mainstream, confine them to a future without hope and material advancement, then despair, envy, anger and criminality will surely follow.
This is no time to feel either smug or complacent about this country's antisocial youth - and a quick look at the numbers appearing in the Youth Court will testify to the scale of our own problem. Rather, it should be an urgent flag to engage meaningfully and productively with them.
