Ken Livingstone
Last Thursday I was at a talk by Ken Livingstone organised by UCL Union’s Labour Society and just happened to have my camera with me, would you believe.
Unfortunately after a day doing other work, I didn’t have time to pick up a flash (which I’d forgotten to pack at 7am, unsurprisingly), and the light in the lecture theatre was poor. Although this isn’t a massive issue with my fast prime lens, my new 17-40mm f/4 L USM was the lens I wanted to use to get some nice wide shots of the audience and Ken on stage, so the photos aren’t the best I could have produced.
That said, I’m happy with most of the shots, which you can find in the gallery at the bottom of this post. My thoughts on his talk follow…
Ken’s talk wasn’t that impressive, to be honest. He covered a lot of material, from the election of Obama and the environment to the rise of China as a global superpower and the current Middle East conflict, mainly avoiding talking about London and last year’s electoral defeat. In the Q&A that followed, I asked whether he thought politics was changing in the new media world, particularly following the Obama campaign’s use of social and new media tools like Twitter and so on. Unfortunately, all he really said in response was that blogs are good because they tell you things newspapers don’t, which wasn’t really answering the question of whether politics is changing!
It’s a shame he wasn’t as good as I was expecting (I’d been looking forward to hearing him for a few weeks), but since he made several references to his plans for the 2012 election, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from him in the next few years. There was some brief excitement as he was (verbally) attacked on remarks he’d made about the current Gaza conflict, but he didn’t seem to care – he shrugged it off and carried on. He reiterated comments I seem to recall him making several years ago about the need to conserve water (the old, ‘if it’s yellow, let it mellow…’ philosophy), but made some good points on the environment.
I suppose my disappointment comes not from the fact that he said nothing interesting, but more from the fact that it was mostly analysis of the current global situation and not a call to action. He’s probably saving that for the run-up to the 2012 election, I guess.
