Response to The Freedom Association (part 1)

( Original post by Tom Waters of TFA here: http://bit.ly/qo0fA6 )

This whole post utterly fails to deal with the first half of Livingstone's argument (which focuses on the police force's problems of funding, staffing and general public image, albeit rather briefly as befits a short interview for breaking news coverage) and proceeds to argue semantics - how exactly is Ken supposed to refer to political leaders, if not people at the top of society? "People in the middle" perhaps? "People in Rupert Murdoch's pocket" maybe? And should he really be expected to launch into a discussion around the difficult nature of using hierarchical terms to label different strata of society when he's basically on there for soundbites and knee-jerk reactions?

The discussion of EMA cuts is clearly meant to contextualise the rioting - as Ken says, the rioters are fearless, inspired by the fact they have nothing to lose, and the uncertainty brought about by scrapping EMA is merely one example of that. He's not saying people are breaking into Foot Locker because they can't afford to buy text books for college next month, and refuting that line of argument is a laughably elementary straw-man. Ken's argument is boiled down towards the end when he says "this is anger and it's disaffection" - a point which is wholly ignored here, in favour of arguing that "youth unemployment is unlikely to be the cause of the riots – it’s barely changed in 24 months" (using a fantastic vaguely-scaled graph to illustrate the point), brilliantly ignoring the fact that we currently have nearly seven hundred thousand young people not in employment education or training (aka NEET's) - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/feb/14/youth-unemployment-statistics - many of whom have likely been in that position for two years or more. Yeah, that's not going to make anyone angry or disaffected.

I hate political posturing as much as the next person, and have to admit Livingstone made more than his fair share of digs at both the government and Boris Johnson, but at the end of the day, that's the name of the game, and arguing that his attempts to rationalise and contextualise the malcontent that has led to this chaos somehow tars everyone with the same brush is pathetic, particularly when, towards the end of his spot, he states "this is not one tenth of one percent of London's young people". All in all, this is typical nitpicking and political posturing (much like Ken's, but with none of the constructive thinking, leaving only the point-scoring and naysaying) as befits TFA's politics.