Response to The Freedom Association (part 2)

( Following Tom Waters' response to my first comment, which can be found here: http://bit.ly/nsTwMo )

Tom,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm not sure my response will achieve much, but it appears from what you've said that I could've been clearer, so I will attempt to elucidate the comments you take issue with. Forgive me for lacking brevity, but spelling things out inherently takes longer.

Firstly, I agree that linking to the video does absolve you of a little of the responsibility to address everything said in the interview, but since we all know that not everyone saw the footage live and not everyone bothers to click on video links for all kinds of reasons (where would we find the time to *do* anything?!), it seems more than a little disingenuous that you opened your second paragraph with "The first reason for the riots that Ken cited", rather than, say "Of the reasons for the riots that Ken cited, the first one I take issue with...". Anyone who does not consult the primary source before reading your post is going to get the impression the Ken really is on cloud-cuckoo land; I don't think that's very fair of you. Another option would perhaps have been to include in your introductory paragraph words to the effect "while Livingstone made some general comments that would be hard to refute, some of his other opinions seemed very revealing...". Without these kinds of qualifying, balancing statements, your original post reads rather like a hatchet job.

I'm still not at all convinced it reveals anything much about how Ken values people if he refers to people at the "top" and/or "bottom". For one thing, I don't think by "top" he strictly meant "politicians", which is why he didn't use the word "politicians" - he meant (relatively) wealthy and powerful; politicians, journalists, businessmen and women, perhaps even to some extent the police. At any rate, the "top" was used more as a binary alternative to his viewing of the people involved in rioting as being from the "bottom" of society. These words only have any implicit value-judgement attached if you yourself view a position at the top as more desirable than a position at the bottom, and your objection to these terms perhaps reveals your own prejudice that people at the bottom are in the least desirable position, and thereby are the least valuable/valued of all people.

Of course, I have no doubt that you would retort that you'd rather not see things in such strictly hierarchical terms, and prefer to value all people equally (which is a sentiment I share, but moving on from that idealism) we must accept that hierarchies of wealth, influence and self-determinism (to name but three) exist within our society, and while I would not personally value the lives of - say, from the political sphere - David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Ed Milliband any higher than three youngsters who did not riot despite being in the same economic position as many of those who did (indeed, to have the courage to not break one's moral views in the face of that kind of peer-pressure surely makes you a much more valuable person, in my eyes, than any number of career politicians), that's not to say Dave, Nick and Ed are not infinitely more wealthy and powerful and fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to society than our three hypothetical youngsters. We frequently use terms like top and bottom to describe success and failure, power and powerlessness, wealth and poverty, and indeed value and worthlessness, but again I say these words have no implicit value-judgement attached: top and bottom are merely the extremes of a spectrum we wish to discuss (much like the y axis on your graph, more on which in a moment). Consider, if you will, common English phrases such as "top-down leadership", "to come out on top", "at the bottom of the ladder" and "bottoming out" - while it is entirely possible to take an almost Marxist semiotic slant on things and discuss connotations of value and worthlessness, in practice we're no longer critiquing Ken Livingstone, but rather centuries of refinement of the English language. This waffly two-paragraph response to your objections to two simple terms has probably bored any other readers to tears (and quite possibly done likewise to you and I; I'm nodding off a bit) - imagine how the world would be if we expected all our politicians to qualify their use of casual terms like this, all the time.

Now then, the link between fearlessness and the EMA. There isn't one. It's entirely imaginary. It is a straw man you and many others have invented to allow you to focus on one silly incongruous detail rather than examine the wider picture. Look again at what I said: "The discussion of EMA cuts is clearly meant to *contextualise* the rioting" and "the uncertainty brought about by scrapping EMA is *merely one example* of [the fact rioters have nothing to lose]" This in no way contradicts your argument that "if you were in London the night before last, you knew you could go out, loot some shops, and be 99.9% sure that you wouldn't be caught". Let's look again, I said:
"the rioters…have nothing to lose"
You said:
"loot some shops, and be 99.9% sure that you wouldn't be caught"
I'm pretty sure we're arguing the same thing there. I haven't, didn't and will not (nor did Ken, nor anyone else so far, as far as I know) say "the rioters felt more uncertain because they no longer had EMA, and then acted on that uncertainty with criminal acts" - that's your straw man, right there.

The uncertainty and hopelessness is borne out of the *context* of no EMA, rising youth unemployment, rising unemployment in general, cuts to public services, inflation, recession, communities in need of regeneration, and a myriad of other factors. I am NOT painting a direct link of causality between EMA (nor any of the other factors I just mentioned) and rioting, and the crux of my argument around that subject was (and is) that refuting the arguments of anyone who dares mention EMA with silly quibbling about the lack of riots seven years ago when EMA didn't exist (strictly speaking, that's not true, anyway - it was trialled through a range of deprived UK councils as far back as 2000) is a very simple (and lazy) straw man argument. The fact you haven't responded to that point suggests that either you know full well it's a straw man and don't want to concede the point, or else you're not sure what a straw man is.

You seem to feel the motivations for the riots perhaps weren't anger and disaffection. I've seen no evidence to suggest anything else was involved. If the BBM messages continue to emphasise 'free stuff', doesn't that fit with 'disaffection' - no longer willing to play by society's rules, to earn the things you covet? Wasn't the utterly senseless (and not at all looting-related) burning and smashing of shops and restaurants (and some homes) with nothing of value inside a pretty fine example of 'anger'? Again, you trot out the line of politicians 'not caring'. I believe the actual words Ken used were:
"[The rioters] feel no one at the top of society in government or city hall cares about them or speaks for them."
This isn't an argument for more 'hug a hoodie' soundbites, and nor is he strictly saying that politicians don't care; rather he is employing empathy to again try to contextualise their actions - the rioters feel unrepresented and hopeless, so they feel no responsibility to society. You may have heard this interview (source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424) which makes all-too-clear that at least a few - and likely the vast majority - of the rioters have no connection with politics, and indeed no real understanding of the spectrum of wealth they find themselves at the bottom (that word again!) end of. I don't think Ken was suggesting that anger and disaffection were/are the sole cause of rioting (any more than the EMA), but merely that these are the backdrop, that this state of being disconnected from society and without anything to lose makes it possible for people to attempt to rationalise such arrant criminal behaviour.

"I can't believe that less well off people have so little moral backbone as to riot when they are angry about losing some benefits - and that's where I think Ken was wrong. He wasn't giving them enough credit… ...I didn't say that he was tarring everyone with the same brush, but implying that the thing stopping people from rioting is that they are well off enough already and have jobs ignores the fact that people don't riot because they know it to be wrong."

Firstly, we're both beginning to fall into the trap of oversimplifying the argument to a question of wealth, when it's already been established that at least some of the rioters have been relatively much more affluent than we might have expected. Secondly, I think the "less than one tenth of one percent" comment Livingstone made gives a lot of people a lot of credit, and criticising him for not spending more of the interview discussing the motivations of those who chose not to riot is again rather unfair - if asked to pass a comment on the tuition fee protests a politician wasted time talking about how wonderful everyone who didn't protest is, we'd rightly wonder if the politician had gone mad. It's a fine example of faulty generalisation to suggest that Ken was claiming less well off people have little moral backbone and so decided to riot because they were angry about losing benefits. Meanwhile, the inverse - that the fact so many people living in similar circumstances didn't riot proves somehow that those circumstances didn't in any way motivate the minority who did - is yet more faulty logic, this time ad populum.

On the matter of the graph, I'm very capable of identifying the time and quantity axes, my issue is with the vagaries of the quantity axis - the figure seems to fluctuate around the twenty mark, but twenty what? Twenty people? Twenty million people? Twenty tonnes of people? Twenty percent of people? And are these young people NEET or merely unemployed? "Rate" usually (but not always) implies a percentage or other measure of proportion: in this case, it's quite a useless statistic to use when claiming that unemployment hasn't changed in two years (quite beside the fact it obviously has peaked and troughed but seems to be in roughly the same place it was two years ago this month, the fact is the population has grown in that time, and so the numbers will have swollen even if the line was utterly flat). Also, I'm not sure where you got your most recent figures from - any chance of a source? I'm not doubting you, but I had great difficulty finding anything from ONS so recent: figures usually look at the three months prior to their publication.

I have no idea whether Ken Livingstone will be embarrassed by his comments, and no interest in speculating around that possibility. My feeling simply remains that while you could've criticised his comments on the grounds of shameless posturing and point-scoring (and I would have agreed), you instead took the route of attempting to pick apart his other comments, indulging in the process in a great deal of illogical argument, which had little to do with what was actually said and far more to do with what you chose to hear.

Again, thanks for taking the time to reply.