After simmering tensions boiled over into violence on the streets, Broadstairs writer and KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd reflects on the fears and flaws we all share - and calls for more empathy on all sides…

Nobody is indigenous to the UK. No one. We are all immigrants. We are all descended from Africans. Whether your family arrived yesterday or a thousand years ago, not one of us has any more right to lay claim to this soggy lump of land than any other.

I stopped watching the riots when they started setting fire to hotels with people inside, as women watched and cheered. Why does it appall me so much more when it’s women? Do I honestly still believe women more capable of empathy? Instead, they stood and laughed as the flames grew, watching and waiting for the screams to start.

More horrifying perhaps is the paucity of the rioters' ambitions - having set off on a path of lawlessness, they loot Greggs to steal a tray of sausage rolls, Lush for a bar of soap. They set fire to libraries and police cars and Citizens Advice Bureaus, anything that might make life better.

I read In Cold Blood recently, Truman Capote’s masterpiece about the senseless slaying of a Kansas family. It deserves to be read for how he makes you care as much for the killers as the killed. You desperately don’t want the murders to take place, you’re praying for the inevitable to somehow be evaded, not only for the slain family, not even particularly for them, but for the killers’ sake. You want them to appreciate sunsets, make art, fall in love, feel contentment. You ache for the desperate tragedy of their potential being squandered, all for a few dollars.

It’s such senseless idiotic waste, so easily avoided, with just a little kindness from someone. But the kindness isn’t forthcoming, and everyone dies, and even those that don’t - Capote, for instance - are destroyed by what they’ve witnessed. And I’m glad he wrote it, glad I read it, but how tragic he had to die a wretched premature death for it.

People need to read more. They need to read. They need to be made to understand that other people have different ambitions, opinions, vocabularies, pastimes, and these differences are absolutely fine. It’s really nothing to be frightened about. It’s actually sort of interesting.

Well, the mess will be cleared up, eventually, and people will go to prison and lose their jobs, and I don’t suppose that will help race relations a bit, and the resentment and hatred will continue to simmer under the surface until it boils over again, one future sunny weekend.

I remember when I was about four screaming with alarm at a woodlouse crawling over the kitchen floor, and begging my mum to kill it, kill it. And my mum saying, now, now, Mr Woodlouse doesn’t mean you any harm, does he? He’s just toddling off to spend a quiet evening with Mrs Woodlouse and their young family, a spot of supper and a story before bed, just like you and me: why would you have me interfere with that? And I sobbed with shame that I had tried to spoil his peaceful evening plans, then tried to rescue him and feed him chips, my enthusiasm no doubt killing him quicker than any quantity of poison.

Probably my mum regretted this salutary lesson in empathy, for it swiftly became an inability to eat animals, or their produce, or kill flies or fleas. Nonetheless, I’m glad she taught me that lesson. Why don’t other mothers teach their children that lesson? I guess the mothers are terrified too. If you really believe “they” are coming here to kill and rape us: if you truly believe it’s “their” children or “ours”, I guess you would be terrified.

I’m trying to understand, I really am, because obviously dismissing them all as thugs, morons, the other, beyond comprehension or empathy, is to colossally miss the point. They are frightened, We’re all frightened, I get it. They show their fear by burning down libraries; I show mine by tutting and writing prissy think pieces for newspapers: we’re all flawed. All immigrants, and all flawed, and all, we must believe, capable of better.

Those laughing and cheering as a hotel is consumed by flames are as much deserving of pity as the poor devils cowering inside. Perhaps more.