Circuses, but Less Bread 1532


The London Olympics are already achieving the number one aim of the politicians who brought them here, which is making our politicians feel very important indeed.

The media is quite frenetic in its efforts to make us all believe we should be terrifically proud of the fact we are hosting the Olympics, as though there were something unique in this achievement. If we can’t competently do something that Greece, Spain and China have done in recent years, that would be remarkable. Of course the Games will be on the whole well delivered, sufficient for the media and politicians to declare it an ecstatic success. Some of the sporting moments will be sublime, as ever.

But did it have to be in London? We won’t know the total cost of the Games for months, but it will cost the taxpayer at least £9 billion and I suspect a lot more. I also suspect the GDP figures will, in the event, show that the massive net fall in visitor numbers has hurt the already shrinking economy further.

But to take the most optimistic figure, holding the Olympics in London has cost every person in the country an average of £150 per head in extra taxes. That is £600 for a family of four. Actually it is in the end going to be well over £2,000, as of course the money has been borrowed on the never never, and taxpayers are going to be paying it off their whole lives, along with the sum ten times higher they are already paying direct into the pockets of the bankers through their taxes.

The very rich, of course, don’t pay much tax, so they are not worried.

But to take just the figure of £600 extra taxes for a family of four, the lowest possible amount, and not including the interest. Is having the Olympics here really worth paying out £600 for? If Tony Blair had approached the head of the family and said “We are going to have the Olympics in London, but it’s going to cost you £600, would the answer have been from most ordinary people: “Yes, great idea, this is that important to us”?

People are not disconcerted because they don’t see that they have to pay. There is no special Olympics tax, and they pay their taxes in a variety of ways, and individuals are not the sole source of taxation. But this is nonetheless real money taken from the people in pursuit of the hubris of politicians.

I love sport. I hate the corruption of the International Olympic Committee, Fifa and the rest; I hate the vicious corporatism and militarisation of our capital and absurd elitism of the transport lanes; the sport itself I love. But with the economy contracting, and the NHS being farmed out for profit, is it really worth £600 for a family – and many families are really struggling in a heartbreaking way – is it worth the money to have the Olympics here rather than in Paris?

Of course it isn’t. I think many of us will feel an extra pleasure watching the Opening ceremony because it is British. Patriotic pride will surge. It is not wrong to enjoy the spectacle tonight on TV. The corporate well connected and ruling classes will enjoy it in the stadium.

But after you have watched it on TV, ask yourself this question. How much more did you enjoy it than enjoy watching the Beijing ceremony, and was that margin of extra enjoyment something that everybody in the room would have paid out £150 for?

Because they just did.


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1,532 thoughts on “Circuses, but Less Bread

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  • Suhayl Saadi

    Crab, agreed. I thought the cannon ‘dropping’ the man into the pit was apt. Then, after (the resurrected) Eric Idle (Englishman Abroad who gets down and with it) and the syncretic Sikh bhangra troupe had done their (coloured powder) ‘Holi’ (Hindu festival) dance, the flying man gets fired straight into the net. Peace.
    .
    Lots of superb performances, Muse was amazing. I thought maybe George Michael was miming, though? Perhaps I’m wrong. Daltrey was in good voice, esp. considering he’s in his 68 years old. Great to see Townsend, too (so, Komodo, we got The Who, after all). The Lennon ‘face’ human sculpture was very clever. Liked the idea of cars moving round the stadium and the Beatles theme. Jessie J and Emile Sand were really powerful, as were the phoenix fire-ballet dancers. All in all, a good showcase, well choreographed.

    .
    And a good time was had by all.

  • Mary

    Disagree Jon about Grey Thompson. Blair should NOT be touched with a bargepole. And her presence on the board of Transport for London? Is that for sport too? She is just collecting up any goodies that come her way.

    .
    Blair incidentally is coming on Radio 4 Today this morning to give his views. He should know that we do not care a fig for what he thinks.
    .
    The irony was lost last night as Lennon’s image appeared and his Imagine was played. The war criminal Cameron and the Apache pilot P Harry ‘We Do Bad Things to Bad People’ were listening in the front row. The whole thing was too long, tedious, disjointed and contrived. It seemed a homage to the internal combustion engine and the pop trash of the 80s and 90s including some druggy fashion models. An insult to the athletes who had tried their hearts out on the arena lying beneath this costly froth.
    .
    Imagine there’s no heaven
    It’s easy if you try
    No hell below us
    Above us only sky
    Imagine all the people living for today
    .
    Imagine there’s no countries
    It isn’t hard to do
    Nothing to kill or die for
    And no religion too
    Imagine all the people living life in peace
    .
    You, you may say
    I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
    I hope some day you’ll join us
    And the world will be as one
    .
    Imagine no possessions
    I wonder if you can
    No need for greed or hunger
    A brotherhood of man
    Imagine all the people sharing all the world
    .
    You, you may say
    I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
    I hope some day you’ll join us
    And the world will live as one

    .
    Ha! I wish.

  • Komodo

    Managed to restrain myself from watching the closing ceremony, but delighted the Who got in, Suhayl! IMO THE best Brit band ever.
    We do seem to be getting a hell of a lot of spin in the aftermath though. It has all the marks of a centrally concocted and extremely confused narrative…primary kids to get at least two hours of compulsory competitive sport a week, poor little mites, and who knew a special terminal had been erected at Heathrow to get the punters out after the games? Who paid for that, then?
    .
    If primary school kids got two hours of compulsory engineering a week, and if the Olympics bill were matched with science and technology investment, then, I feel, we’d be getting somewhere. But (many of the best are neither young nor attractive), scientists do not get most of their kit off and emote to camera; nor do our leaders take time off from failing to address the clusterfuck economy in order to watch titrations and claim the credit for the data.
    Bloody grrr.

  • Cryptonym

    Glenn_uk, you’ve obviously never listened to the radio show, even for study purposes.
    Obama Conspiracy, haven’t a clue, I referred not once to any such thing.
    You don’t understand peak oil yourself, it is the disparity between growth in demand, yes despite the recession/austerity, contrasted with no significant new finds or capacity.
    It’s not worth responding to your post deservedly, without falling foul of moderation.

  • Cryptonym

    Back now having more time to reply than in brief.
    .
    It isn’t necessary to agree with everything Jones says, to share any of his obsessions and hobby horses, in order to appreciate that the thing he does, whatever it is, he does well, that was qualified praise, I don’t see anything like “you’ve followed up the lie with some more lies”, which lie, which lies? Point them out specifically or fall on your sword. You have to be a radio person, preferring that media to passive television viewing. I’ve never once read any material on any of his websites or indeed visited them, instead having access to high quality mp3 audio encodes of his show, a day or so after they’re broadcast. You stick with al-jazeera, cnn, fox and the bbc: keeping bantamweight minds firmly closed.

  • Komodo

    Oho. Sock puppets. Look, chap”s”, please take it from me that Craig, Jon and Clark are all 38th degree Masons, and regularly have conventicles with Bilderberg and all the Rothschilds. Most of the posters here will be spending the equinox partying inside a giant pyramid in Dundee, to which aliens from Planet Zog have also been invited. The spectacle will be far superior to the Olympics opening ceremony, and the Queen will be outlining the next phase of the NWO. Why don’t you join us?

  • Passerby

    By the looks of the betar is off and we have to put up with zit face adolescent ziofuckwits regurgitating the Hitler Channel shite.

  • Chris Jones

    “It isn’t necessary to agree with everything Jones says, to share any of his obsessions and hobby horses, in order to appreciate that the thing he does, whatever it is, he does well”
    .
    Asoloutely

  • John Goss

    The answer to all these trolls is to let them blow off steam but steer clear of the release valve. Their hot air is tainted. If you join the stream you become tainted too.

  • Cryptonym

    I would say that there is more than a whiff of restrained homophobia and overt racism in Jones’ output, his rants on immigration, Mexican particularly, wouldn’t be acceptable here, even to the Daily Heil. American politics and discourse is so far removed from reality that despite such abhorrent inhumane views, which he doesn’t hide well or at all, he can pass for a moderate person on their warped spectrum. His sickly religiosity – the febrile ‘god’ thing crops up in his expositions, in figures of speech more than enough to butter up the deluded, who it has to be said form a great part of his audience as they do of the US population – by itself condemns him to the raving margins. He still does ask pointed and informed questions and raises issues, denounces party politics and the trojanned American practice of democracy. You have to take the good with the bad in all people, he’s not a demagogue, just wants to hang on to his gas-guzzling trucks, guns, estate and position of relative privilege in American -Texan society, he’d be a superfluous wet Tory over here.

  • Mary

    I see that some of the trained killers carried the flag at the end. It started off with a lot of union flag waving, the arena was designed by Damien Hirst to resemble the union flag and it ended with one. I think we have got the message Mr Cameron and Mr Coe. Red, White and Blue.
    .
    http://imgace.com/pic/2012/08/british-military-carry-the-olympic-flag/
    .
    Justine Greening was paying huge thanks to the police and the military this morning for giving us …a safe and secure games. That was and is the mantra.

  • Komodo

    What John Goss said.
    .
    This would work better as a forum, where who and what gets banned is stated clearly in the Terms and Conditions. Jon and Clark: Mods are ALWAYS in the wrong. It’s part of the job description. You’ll never see a troll volunteering to do it either…

  • Passerby

    Mark Golding,
    You have highlighted the almost clinical slaughter of human beings, on an industrial scale that is going unreported and no one is talking about it.
    ,
    Further as per Geneva conventions, and rules of war, do these killer robots stand guilty of war crimes? Are the manufacturers of these killing machines stand guilty of war crimes? How about the share holders and the employees of the said manufacturers? Are the operators of such a killing machinery liable to stand guilty of war crimes? The sickening fact that the individuals involved in design, construction, profiteering from, and operating these death machinery thousands of miles away, during the course of their daily routine, and then go back to their families and sit down for supper is the most macabre code of conduct in the annuals of history.
    ,
    Technology at the hands of hairless monkeys has but one course of progress: to be used for inflicting even greater degrees of death and destruction.

  • Mary

    Hunt, Johnson and Coe are conducting a mutual admiration press conference and congratulating themselves and others for a ‘magnificent games’. Just as Hunt (he of the broken handbell clanger) started his piece, his mobile rang. No it wasn’t Fred Michel. It was his wife. He coloured up, his eyes got wider and he was totally discomforted. I think Cameron will be saying bye bye to him next month.

  • Chris Jones

    And while this great closing ceremony with its message of world peace was being played out, the uk government regime, headed by the queen, was busy aiding and funding terrorist criminals in attacking a sovereign country and killing its civilians. Desperate morrally bankrupt double speak on a mass scale.

  • Mary

    Have just heard the TV ‘news’. They have moved seamlessly from the british olympics triumphalism back to Syria with a story about the rebels shooting down a Syrian air force jet. That and the murder of the child in New Addington. Oh and the papal butler who has admitted to the theft of Benedict’s letters. What did they contain?

    .
    Earlier Coe admitted that he and his colleagues had received the IOC ‘order’ this morning! Would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the ‘ceremony’. Did they have to roll up a trouser leg etc? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Order
    See Romney got one, for bailing out Salt Lake City presumably.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq Association

    Considering totalitarianism many fingers point to Iran as an example. Organizing a chart in my head gives me a clue and after the boxes have been ticked we realise that Iran is authoritarian.
    .
    Iran’s leader is an individual rather than a function and a dominant ideology —————————————–!!!
    .
    Sorry I’ll continue later; just heard little Tia Sharp who was wrapped in a bed-sheet and put into a black bin liner was murdered by the man who ‘loved her to bits’ – fucking dirty bastard!

  • Komodo

    No, Mark, it’s a regime. Being a regime, it is inherently evil, invariably authoritarian, and it is a legitimate target for freedomlovingdemocracies and even hardworkingfamilies. Just remember this handy guide:
    .
    We have a government
    Our friends have legislatures
    Iran has a regime
    .
    M’kay?

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