Just putting this here for future reference.

[supermouse]

Last year, there were several people saying that cutting the police would cause riots, and cutting youth services in certain depressed areas of London would lead, eventually to social unrest (i.e. riots). One such article header is "Theresa May: We can cut police budget without risking violent unrest" from September 2010 and is being recirculated a lot right now for obvious reasons. Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister was quoted last year warning of riots if the Tories - with their track record of cutting services for the poor and taxes for the rich - were elected.

And then the Tories were elected and police numbers were cut and youth services were cut. And then there were riots.

Comments

[matgb]

Heh, network trawling, FWIW and as you've posted for future reference.

Clegg was talking specifically that there were going to be big cuts coming (he'd been warning about them for over a year, "savage cuts" was one of his lines) and that it would be important for the Govt to have support from as broad a base as possible in order to minimise social disruption and riots.

Because, seriously, the size of the cuts being implemented from this Govt is roughly the same as what Alistair Darling said he'd do, and much smaller than either the LDs or the Tories said would possibly be needed.

The question is not how bad are the riots &c, but how much worse could they otherwise have been. And that's really scary.

(the interview was edited for that broadcast, and PSbook have an interesting approach to facts when they report things, there was a full transcript at the time, I can remember reading it but it's over a year ago)