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.
I’ll qualify that: if I see a vast and expensive ceremony purporting to depict the state of affairs pre-1900 in Britain/England/London, I DO care if half the actors playing industrialists are black/Chinese/Indian because that was simply not the case. Unfortunately, it is true now. See bloody Mittal.
http://www.redwebsecurity.com/products/forensic-tagging
“I DO care if half the actors playing industrialists are black/Chinese/Indian”
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They weren’t “actors”, they were voluteers, weren’t they. And in London in 2012, that’s what one would expect them to be – black/Chinese/Indian etc etc. So what?
yeh bro wo’evva.
“Dreadful headline on this link but it shows the segment you refer to. I think that the lighting gave the effect of the colour orange.”
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Very hard to interpret that dance, done during Abide with Me. Was the male dancer welcoming the boy, or enticing him, into the group? It’s not at all clear. And the harsh orange light could have been anything – including global warming. The dancers certainly looked like they were writhing in something, like heat.
Mary , watch the ripple effect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7PQG5weeHk
There is much about 7/7 that just does not add up.
The guy who made this film was imprisoned for around 6 months before finally being freed. His crime, he was curious because the traíns that they said the bombers took from Luton were cancelled that day.
Well worth a watch.
The ticket fiasco, or the tickets which were never sold, or the tickets which went to the corporates just because they sponsored the events, which is it?
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The rows of empty seats, that are seating the army personnel turned security guards (now the poor sods are ordered to watch the events and cheer too, in their off time), are far too evident to be swept under the carpet, hence the furore.
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Fact that prior to the games starting the world was witnessing the military preparations, that included the anti aircraft missiles, and howitzers, and destroyers, and helicopter gunships, and fast fighter jest getting ready to defend the ol impics. This may have somewhat dampened the appetite of the Johnny Foreigner, who has access to Internet and can watch the welcoming Londoners doing their party piece on Youtube about “my Briwtain is fuakk all now” rendition along with the bemused baby who is all too familiar with the outburst and language to care for his screaming mother’s rants.
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That is in addition to the welcoming immigration staff in the various airports, certainly would put off most of Johnny Forefingers mates, and neighbours to even contemplate to come to London to be “meeted and greeted”, all the while falling prey to the greedy landlords for the privilege of getting abused and made hanging around by the elaborate security arrangements.
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Further, given that these days any function of any importance or for that matter no importance at all, needs the security clearance for the attendees, then selling the tickets to the un-vetted Joe Public is a non flier too, needles to point out that the empty seats are an elegant and inevitable subsequence of prating around and jerking around the people at large whom en mass have voted with their feet.
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However, the ensuing hullabaloo about the most private ol impics ever to be held in the history of the games, has now compelled the organizers to rush and find bodies to shove into the seats, and the promotional vox pops aplenty of the loud mouth middle aged and over weight females all intent on getting tickets, which were apparently all sold out, and if only they could they would buy a ticket at any cost stories.
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The question remaining will there be enough bodies found in time to play spectators, and is there a push for the job clubs to send the job seekers to go and watch the games and wave flags and clap and whistle as instructed by their job club team leaders?
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Finally the puzzle of the day is;
Spain has a rate of 0.4 percent attrition/contraction/gone up in smoke rate in her economy, and also sports a 25 percent rate of unemployment.
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UK on the other hand has a rate of 0.7 percent attrition/contraction/gone up in smoke rate in her economy, with only a single digit rate of unemployment.
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Therefore proving that the proposition of the worst the depression the less the unemployment holds true!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????
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Hence:
Up yours Spaniards!!
Komodo, I love people who want quote an identifiably British culture unquote. I imagine they have a little list. Strangely they are often good at throwing around fabricated statistics (50 percent speaking Polish, really) too.
And yet it seems you would have preferred these Polish speakers to the British volunteers of various hues, since at least they would have had the inverted commas right skin colour. Very odd.
Its pretty clear wtf I was on about. Its also pretty clear wtf you are on about. Being British means being white (sic) not playing horrible rap music and speaking English like what she is meant to be spoke. Classy.
Well, I agree with you about the ticket fiasco.
My brother in London applied to several venues for his family of four to a total of £6K+, thinking he would at least get to see one event. He didn’t get any seats. He applied again at the second release, once more with no luck. Totally fed up with the process he is now on a beach in Sardinia with the family –
Radio 4 “good torture” vs “bad torture”…
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Cant help but remember this:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc
Komodo, I think you have betrayed yourself as an old curmudgeon. I’m in my late 40’s and love the music of Roots Manuva. He’s a rap artist with a sense of irony and a completely British sensibility and great tunes.
However, about that £150 cost:
I thought watching the Queen apparantly parachute into the Stadium to the Bond theme was brilliant. Irreverent, anti-authoritarian, and very funny, uniting the nation in a real laugh, well worth £20.
My mother, an Essex girl remembers when Stratford was a dump, literally. The transformation is surely worth another £30.
Seeing women finally “allowed” to represent their own country in sport – well, I would have paid more, but a bargain at another £20.
Lauding our NHS and its workers, with publicity for the GOSH, worth another £30.
Having the ParaOlympians fully included in pre-Games build up, fabulous, worth £20 in anyone’s money.
And then having those fantastic buildings ready for further sporting events, I think a bargain at £30.
Uniting MOST of the nation in hopes and fears and thrills and even boredome – proceless.
Uniting the world for a few minutes – priceless.
Having a commentator here suspect some conspiracy because on the whole and with some reservations I am pro-Olympics – priceless.
@komodo Chris “I certainly missed your point if you were saying that the ceremony wasn’t very British: as an ex-member of the SNP I found this too obvious to comment on from that standpoint”.
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“All I want is an identifiably British society”
..err no,what i was saying was that the ceremony didnt represent all the three countries of Britain (Northern Ireland arent technically in ‘Great Britain’), not that it wasnt ‘British’. You would be better off looking for an identifiable English,Welsh or Scottish society first before making it really challenging and extending it to a society that is simmilar accross the island and countries of Britain – we do share common cultures and themes of course but then again so does France and England, New Zeland and Australia,Russia and the USA.
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Its an interesting point you raise about cities being nominated and not countries though – highly linked to corporate city states i would suggest. I also agree that it looked highly contrived and forced turn the industrial revolution scenes in to a highly unrealistic ‘multicultural’ fest as well. Historically inaccurate is probably the best description.
Personally I can’t see past King Tubby, Clanger. 🙂 I was just enjoying (?) the kneejerk responses.
Mary
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Tom Secker is good on 7/7
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http://www.investigatingtheterror.com
Now I really, really shouldn’t rise to NI not being British except to comment that you’ve made the CIRA very happy there, Chris. But if you want an instance of where multiculti can lead, I believe (London)Derry is a good place to see it.
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*shitstirring smiley*
Cultural Marxism and the degradation of society.
How we are entertained depends on our level of social integrity.
How wonderful music , drama and dance.
Bitch…
Komodo, what’s up, O Lizard One? First, you seemed irritated with something I wrote (which wasn’t meant to irritate), then you come out with all this stuff about Poles, Indians and so on.
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Personally, I don’t like much hip-hop music and to some extent I think it’s used by the powers that be in the arts, etc. to ghettoise/control and be tokenistic towards certain groups (as is the ‘black pimp/gangsta’ image that sometimes goes with it and against which Malcolm X, who once had been a pimp, railed) – believe me, I’ve seen this process happen – but I recognise that lots of people do like it and identify with it in the way the one can with music. I also recognise that like most art-forms, it is polyvalent, it has multiple referents and you know, some/many art-forms have both empowering and limiting dynamics – they don’t always align tightly with politics or political orientation. Read Robin Denselow on this, for example. I didn’t see most of the ceremony, of course!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Denselow
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Like punk music, in Britain, it is thoroughly British (and in France, it is thoroughly French and in Palestine, it is thoroughly Palestinian). It doesn’t stop us all enjoying and celebrating Benjamin Britten, Italian Opera (eg. as three weeks ago, in a Covent Garden open square, iterated by a soprano from Paisley, Scotland), Morris Dancing, Northumbrian pipes, the clarsach or The Who, if we so wish. Like Eric Clapton’s music, and like the whole of rock and jazz music, The Who’s music was based on Black American music (which already had merged with Celtic music wrt gospel and ‘Latin’ music too, with lots of Arabic/North African rhythms – red Ted Gioia on the history of jazz.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia
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Get some fresh water, lie in the sun. Simply, be.
Now now Komodo. I dont want to get too much off the Olympic topic but technically Northern Ireland isnt a part of ‘Great Britain’ but can be part of the Olympic team GB. However they are still part of the UK….Confusing? yes. But whatever the case they were still represented …with about 30 seconds of children standing on the rocky Northern Irish shore singing – thats it. Same goes for Wales and Scotland.
On a brighter note, the womens beach volleyball was excellent
This link should probably be on the previous post (torture) but as he was instrumental in landing us with these Limp Ics, I am putting it here. It is the latest alert from the Medialens Editors.
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The Return Of The King – Tony Blair And The Magically Disappearing Blood
By David Cromwell
http://bit.ly/MfhMM5
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I have just been looking at the RIO website. Same old. Same old. Different location. Almost the same gangsters.
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The Worldwide Olympic Partners who support the Rio 2016™ Olympic Games and the National Olympic Committees around the world are Coca-Cola, Atos, Dow, GE, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Procter and Gamble, Samsung and Visa.
{http://www.rio2016.org/en/news/news/rio-2016-announces-nissan-as-automotive-sponsor-of-the-olympic-games-in-rio}
Benjamin Britten drew heavily on Gamelan (Indonesian) music.
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Ted Gioia identified Arab/Berber music (as well as obviously, West African and Arabo-Berber-Spanish) music in jazz.
Mary, congratulations. You just submitted the 100,000th comment to this blog!
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That’s the 100,000th comment submitted; not all of those have been published. There are a few thousand that have been spammed etc.
“Thanks Prince Charles!”
http://twitpic.com/adjapk
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“However they are still part of the UK….Confusing? yes.”
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Not really. UK stands for “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. Without Northen Ireland, there is no ‘UK’ to talk about. There is just Britain: England, Scotland and Wales.
Under the terms of a long-standing settlement between the BOA and the Olympic Council of Ireland, athletes from Northern Ireland can elect to represent either Britain or Ireland at the Olympics, as Northern Irish people are legally entitled to dual citizenship.
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So saith Wiki.
Is that 100,000 from Mary?
Mary, you beat me to it by seconds, you, you, you… bism, you!
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I propose we give Mary an London 2012 Olympic Gold medal for achieveing the 100,000th published comment on this blog. Any seconders…?
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Oh, sorry, the words, ‘2012’, ‘gold’, ‘Olympic’ and ‘London’ associated with any of these are copyright, punishable by being rendered and sent to a blck site.
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Oh well, sorry, Mary, that’s you, you’ll just have to imagine being given the Not-Gold not-medal at the not-London, not-2012 not-Olympics.
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Be mellow, and prosper.
I am not sure where Komodo’s ‘definition’ of a nation comes from.
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Benedict Anderson wrote one of the exemplary accounts of nationalism, Imagined Communities. He ascribes the development of the nation to print culture, which helped to create a sense of others living lives in parallel to one’s own, sharing a language, thinking much the same thoughts, sharing similar interests, etc. However, there is also the potential for this imagined community to ‘precede the territory’ as it were, and to bind together people (and divide people) who share little in common other than membership in a nation (Indonesia is an example. The people in the West of Indonesia, who share so much culturally with Malaysia, still identify more with those from the remote East, whom likely they will never meet).
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Your wish for a purified national identity, to me, seems suspect, in that I doubt it has ever existed, neither in the UK, nor Europe. If we took you back enough years you’d be moaning about the blacks or the Irish, until, who knows, we might get to listen to your comments (not in English) about the Vikings or the Romans.
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In Europe, WWII’s aftermath actually produced ethnically quite pure national units due to mass migration to safe places in its aftermath. To me, that is a shame, as there was a deeply historical cultural mixture dotted around Europe that has largely perished today. I don’t believe it is necessarily only PC-leftie reflex to enjoy living in multicultural environments, anymore than it makes somebody a fascist to have reservations over rapid and high-volume immigration. There’s clearly a difference over the kind of cultural mix that accumulates over centuries and that which arises seemingly overnight.
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What I do take issue with is the idea that immigration is itself responsible for national decline, and that is why a lot of the anti-immigration stuff from UKIP and BNP etc leaves me cold, because this sense of a thwarted greatness (with imperial undertones) that Britain has been deprived of due to immigration is, to my mind, a total fiction. Unfortunately, that sliver of opinion has crowded out genuine working class concerns; after all, most immigration is focused in working class areas and its working class jobs that are competed for (and regardless, pay and conditions can deteriorate for everybody if a cheap pool of labour is tapped). On this issue, Labour has appeared to court the immigrant vote, while the Tories have engaged in high rhetoric, but refrained from meaningful action because of the fact that big business actually likes the ability to drive wages into the ground that immigration facilitates.
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And in amongst it all, we have the odious detention centre regime that engages in needless punishment of thousands of vulnerable people with dark skins that the majority of the UK population never spares a thought for, Olympics or not.
Conratulations Mary – you deserve a nice mint aero
I agree with most of what you wrote in that excellent post, King Felix, except that immigration drivging down wages is itself a myth. All the research – and a lot has been done – shows that either it has zero impact on wages or that it actually precipitates a rise in wages. That Ed Milliband also now has bought the myth and is pandering to it for fake populism is a reflection of the sad state of the Labour Party today.
It is a typical tactic of the uber-capitalists that they perpetuate that myth about wages and immigrantion and so divide-and-rule working people and also are able then to force wages and terms and conditions of exisiting workers down by the THREAT of bringing in migrant labour.