I used to live in Birmingham, Enfield Town and Walthamstow; I have worked in Tottenham, Hackney and Islington but watching these locations from the safety of my home in Italy is a very surreal experience.  I feel like I am watching an alien nation.

The London riots which have expanded to the rest of the UK (including Manchester as I write) is hard to connect with the Britain I know and love.

It has made me become a news junkie as I search for videos, articles and live footage to try to make some sense of these unprecedented events.

Prof John Pitts, a criminologist,  gives one assessment which sounds credible when he says looting and mob violence are the actions of young people who have “no stake in conformity”. He says that  it makes “powerless people suddenly feel powerful which  is very intoxicating”.  This seems accurate and ,if he is right, it means that appeals to respect  the normal rules of society seem like a knee-jerk response  that will surely fall on deaf ears.

It also means that it is useless to expect change to come from the government or even from police organisations These terrible occurrances do show that people have the power  but in the most negative way possible. In some manner, by communities coming together, this power has got to be turned around so that something positive can come out of all this chaos.

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