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(Olympic) Crisis. What (Olympic) crisis?

July 13, 2012 6:31 pm

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So we’ve banned cars from using main roads since January, paused the construction of Crossrail and the Shard, closed down the London docks, and yet the smog cloud continues to hang over the capital. An athletics reporter from the New York Times checked into her hotel today, she’s handed a mask with her room key, and when she mentions she has asthma, the concierge suggests with a polite smile that she probably shouldn’t spend too long outdoors. After bumping into a reporter on the Evening Standard, she hears that local media have been “encouraged” by an adviser to Jeremy Hunt not to report on the planned protests over the politically sensitive Falklands dispute, being whipped up by Shakira’s call for Latin American solidarity. While the Evening Standard reporter would say this much, he simply shook his head when asked about the missing National Trust activists, angered that the government is supposedly ignoring an outbreak of Mad Cow Disease in Gloucestershire.

This Olympishambles hasn’t happened. But Beijing’s Olympics experienced dangerously high levels of pollution, plans for a celebrity-led boycott and media blackouts over human rights and Tibet. Yet the 2008 Olympics were broadly seen as a great success, remembered for the impressive Bird’s Nest stadium and Usain Bolt. Meanwhile Athens faced a last minute race to open a half-finished stadium and the basic but essential tram line was only completed with weeks to go. And yet, despite the long-term damage to the country’s economy, Greece managed to pull it off.

And Labour’s legacy of London Olympics will be a great success. The stadia have been constructed, and Stratford has been transformed, on time and on budget. Everything about Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, celebrating everything from the nation’s sheep to the campaign for women’s suffrage and British rain to the Windrush, sounds fantastic. And I am planning to make the most of my £20 tickets to see the Greco-Roman Wrestling.

The fact that the government only just noticed the flaws in its security arrangements and didn’t pay sufficient attention to the repair works of a major road points to one of its larger failings. As the Financial Times recently observed, Cameron’s pride in governing like he is Chair of a company board means that he fails to notice problems until they reach the front pages of national newspapers.

While there is always the temptation to kick the government when it’s messed up, Labour would be wrong to be too critical about Olympic difficulties. This morning, the M4 re-opened and whether it’s G4S or our world-class forces, unless we wheel out the Special Catastrophisation Unit London’s security arrangements won’t look shambolic.

Britain has a deeply unattractive tendency to claim failure before we’ve even tried.

In government, Labour fought against this cynicism, and Blair’s bid for the Olympics represented that confidence in what we can achieve.

The voters will remember London 2012 as a success.

And we shouldn’t be joining the Daily Mail brigade in damning the Games before they’ve started.

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  3. An altogether different Olympic legacy
  4. Local government and the Olympic legacy
  5. Blair’s back: TB to advise Labour on “Olympic Legacy” – but how big a role is this?
  • derek

    “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself”
    The games will be the icon of wealth, shrouded in capital liquidity, as the top flight fight for the rights of commercial interests.

    • aracataca

      Correct Derek. However, on the other hand the top flight eg, Bob Diamond or that other comedian at G4S are carrying on as if the current situation isn’t going to change. In this sense they remind me of  the likes of Hugh Scanlon at the end of the 1970s who carried on as if we were still living in 1945, not realising that the era of  the postwar social democratic consensus was well and truly dead.

       In similar vein, the top flight are carrying on as if the era of neo-liberalism begun by Thatcher/Reagan at the beginning of the 1980s, where you get shed loads of money for incompetently doing Jack s**t is going to go on for ever. Cameron and co might spin it out for a few more years but it is over and there is a palpable public sense of  ’we can’t go on like this’. The Olympics will be its last fling.  Times have moved on and the situation has changed and it seems the only people who don’t know it are the Bob Diamonds and Nick Buckles of this world.

  • Lee Matthews

    i think the original cost was going to be about 3 billion, but the final cost will be about 9 billion. How can that possibly be considered “on budget”?.  Perhaps if we hadn’t been “bullshi**ed about the original cost (just so they could get the UK on side) and told us the actual cost of 9 billion then perhaps it could be said the games are “on budget”

    • treborc

       The boxing last night with Hayes, the football spot fixing one idiot said on TV you know this will happen when wages in the lower division are not the same as the premiership, they actually said  it’s difficult to cope and live on £36,000 a week when others get £200,000

      Sport is not sport any more it all about money, money rules.

  • Chilbaldi

    Spot on. I’m getting sick and tired of people moaning about the Olympics.

    The Olympics will pass without a hitch and everyone will have a great time. Apart from the 1% of people who always find something to moan about.

    • aracataca

      What you mean like moaning about the Thatcherite head of G4S getting paid £820,000 a year and not knowing until 3 weeks before the event that we were going to be thousands of security staff short and who is unable to say whether the security staff will be able to communicate in English. 

      Never in the history of our country  has a company deserved £280million of tax payers’ money more for delivering such a first rate level of service and competence and its CEO on £15,750 per week is of course grossly underpaid. Happy Now?

      • jaime taurosangastre candelas

        I saw the interview Mr Buckles gave to the BBC Breakfast News couple.  I was completely unimpressed with all of them, and also LOCOG and the Home Office, who were not represented.

        It seems that G4S initially had a contract for 2,000 security guards, and were then asked to increase that number to 10,000 at the end of last year.  Why such an increase at such a late stage?  Was the increase in numbers spread among other security firms, or merely awarded “sole source” to G4S?  Who made those decisions?  There are questions to answer for both LOCOG and the Home Office.

        What “due diligence” did G4S perform internally to discover if such an increase was possible with the systems of recruitment and training they have, BEFORE they accept such a large increase in their contract?  The question was not asked by the incompetent BBC interviewers, but should have been.  More importantly, why did not LOCOG or the Home Office not ask this question?  It seems glaring obvious as a fact to check before handing over another £200 million of taxpayers’ money.

        What checks and “milestones” were observed by LOCOG and the Home Office between last Christmas and this week, to confirm that G4S were on target to satisfy their contract?  Again, the BBC fail to ask this obvious question, and it does not appear that LOCOG thought of it either.

        Why was the chief manager of G4S apparently completely unaware of the crisis until 10 days ago?  What sort of organisation does he run that pays him so well, and do we want to keep putting public money into such a Keystone Kops company?

        Why was LOCOG also completely unaware until a week ago?

        It appears to be the fashion these days to call for a House of Commons Select Committee enquiry, or even a Judicial Enquiry into just about anything.  Well, for this I believe it is merited.  £280 million of public money going to a company that appears incompetent, LOCOG asleep, the Home Office unaware, 3,500 soldiers having their holiday cancelled after coming back from Afghanistan, and potentially the physical security and well-being of hundreds of thousands of athletes and visitors, not to mention our national reputation, being sacrificed on the altar of incompetence.  Will Ed Miliband carry the flag for this enquiry?

        • aracataca

          The whole thing stinks. The company has been shown to be wholly incompetent. The fact that £280 million of our money has been given to them is quite frankly appalling. The CEO has been shown to be extraordinarily incompetent but is in receipt of a salary of £15,750 per week and 27% of this company’s annual income now comes from government contracts. Indirectly, we are therefore paying a significant proportion of this half-wit’s wages. 
          He gives the impression of thinking he is entitled to shed loads of money for providing a 3rd rate service to taxpayers and expects it to pass unnoticed and uncriticised. The man oozes complacency and incompetence and if he had any decency (although I expect he has none) he would resign or surrender his salary this year to charity.

        • treborc

           Recently, the head of the UK branch of G4S, the largest private security
          firm in the world, predicted that within the next few years an
          increasing amount police work will be allocated and outsourced to
          private security companies-like G4S….

          This company has the record of shame beyond the pale , thank god the private Police idea has now been shelved for a few weeks.

          It runs jails but when it took over the problem was you escaped by saying it’s OK I always go out for a pint

    • treborc

      Phew thank god for that I thought we’d called the army in, my mistake.

  • Davidch1

    And Labour’s legacy of London Olympics will be a great success

    remember, after hubris comes nemisis

  • treborc

    Director of the G4S…..

     John Reid, Director, G4S Regional Management (UK & Ireland) Limited

    John Reid, or Lord Reid of Cardowan, as he prefers to be known, joined G4S in 2009, having previously been Tony Blair’s Home Secretary and Secretaries of State for Health and Defence.
    The £50,000 a year it is giving the New Labour hard man quickly paid
    off for G4S as it landed a multi-million pound, four-year contract to
    supply private security guards for around 200 Ministry of Defence and
    military sites across the UK just three months after it took him
    on.[14]i Since then he has been diligent in ensuring the hi-tech
    security used by his employers is a feature of parliamentary debates
    whenever possible.[15]

    Nothing to do with us sir it down to the Tories.

  • Jim

    whats this about mad cow now?? the only thing worse than a tory is a tory apologist

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