Team GB

This is my second attempt to write this blog, owing to the idiocy that is Windows 7 and its “updates”. Having lost two pages and almost 1000 words to a windows update, and just having spent a considerable amount of time re-installing printer drivers and re-setting all the settings in “Word” back to how I like them, rather than how Bill Gates thinks I want them, I have now determinedly turned OFF “Windows updates” because Microsoft are idiots who cock up my computer and lose my work. In fact, idiots is a bit mild, they are a bunch of mutton-tugging gongfermours who should be stood up against a wall and raked with an AK-47.

Rant over.

Anyway, as I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, I haven’t been keeping up with this political blog of late. This is because of a number of factors coinciding. I’ve been very busy, I’ve been in hospital again (but only for one night, back in May) I lost the login details for the blog itself, briefly, and finally – to top it all off - my old and faithful laptop is no more. Its motherboard, dodgy at best after years of hammer, finally succumbed to a power surge during a lightning strike when the thunderstorm was directly overhead. And that was it, deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares.

This doesn’t mean I’ve lost my interest in politics, of course, far from it. I’ve watched with jaw-dropping incredulity as The Blight staggers on from week to week, from crisis to crisis. Jeremy Hunt and the B Sky B bid, inviting us to choose between the only obvious conclusions, that he was either incompetent or guilty of terminological inexactitudes. What was it Sherlock Holmes said? “When you have discounted the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth.” The double standards on Syria. The phone hacking scandal. The “in a hole, keep digging” philosophy of Osborne on the economy, despite some glimmerings of Keynesian common-sense, on the part of the Literal Dimwits, who have now finally realised that they are on a one-way trip to the electoral abattoir – or at least, some of them have.

I’ve also been watching, in particular, the unfolding fiasco of the Olympics.

By the word “fiasco”, when I say it, I am referring to the totality of the fiasco. The Olympics are a shambles on many levels, some of which have serious implications for the rest of us who couldn’t give a stuff about the mens’ 100 metres, whatever that may be.

I’m not just talking about the obvious things, either – others have done a much better job than I can of deriding the ridiculous and grandiose directives of the various sponsors and LOCOG and their attempts to copyright the words “Olympics” “London”, Gold” Silver” and “Bronze” not to mention “rain”, the official weather of the London Olympics.

Mark Steel, writing in the Independent, and Ray Corrigan in his blog have both pointed out the glaring disparity between the “we’re all in it together”, gung-ho attempts of the likes of LOCOG and the BBC to push the “official” line on the Olympics – that celebration is compulsory, and anyone who doesn’t join in is not only a party-pooper but also potentially a Trotskyist fellow-traveller and a threat to society – and the reality of life in Britain that all of us who aren’t part of “Team GB” face on a daily basis.

A global festival is taking place in our city and we're told every day to stay at home, work at home, and not even use the word Olympic unless we're an official sponsor. By next week, London will have become like the queue for a prestigious nightclub, with bouncers patrolling the streets telling anyone who isn't good-looking or famous to go home, so we don't damage London's global brand image by revealing our unsightly people.

This is already happening – people were being interviewed on the news on TV tonight about how they were being stuck in traffic jams while the so-called “Olympic Lanes” stand temptingly empty.

There is a dark side to this sponsorship issue as well. Some of the sponsors are people who have in the past, been associated with less happy events, sponsoring chemical explosions at Bhopal, for instance. Some of them are not immediately associated in the public mind (rightly or wrongly) with health and sport (McDonalds). All of them, however, seem hell-bent on maximising their “official” involvement, safeguarding it rapaciously, and extracting every last “bang” for their “buck”. The Prime Minister has even joined in, with his claims that the Olympics is going to generate lots of business in the various conference rooms and boardrooms of the capital during the games. He would much rather talk abut this, of course, than have to account for how the economy is in a terminal nosedive under the stewardship of George Osborne. The Olympics is, for The Blight, a good fortnight to bury bad news.

There are so many potential logistics cockups about the Olympics, you could be forgiven for thinking that if LOCOG was tasked with the elevation of some urine, in an environment hitherto given over to alcoholic fermentation, they would struggle to achieve even this.

Anyone who has been watching the BBC’s excellent series “2012” will already be familiar with the numerous crossovers between drama and reality . When you hear about things such as the attempts by McDonalds to ban people from selling chips within the Olympic exclusion zone unless they are accompanied by fish, it’s pretty obvious that we’re on our way to la la land in a handcart.

More worrying, perhaps, is the thought that they only discovered, two weeks before the event, that they would have to shorten the opening ceremony. Did nobody time it? I can’t believe that in all of the multiple tiers of officialdom and Olympic organisation, nobody had access to a stop-watch.

The BBC has now moved into its purpose-built studios on top of a block of flats inside the Olympic Park. These are constructed on top of a block of council flats which are supposedly going to be demolished after the games. But there is another Olympic story there, also, as this posting to an online news site by one of the residents of the estate in question (the Carpenters Estate) shows:

These flats are located on the top five floors of two residential tower blocks, which have the closest panoramic view of the Olympic park and surrounding area. We’ve also been led to believe that the BBC is seeking to spend millions of pounds of tax payers’ money to pay for the change of use from residential homes to commercial TV studios. It’s worth pointing out that even though there are over 28,000 people on Newham Council’s waiting list, the highest in London.

It would seem the Mayor would rather have millions of pounds spent on converting these former homes into BBC studios, rather than insisting on putting families in those apartments, even if it’s for just for five or six years. We have consistently asked the local authority for the proof that these tower blocks were no longer fit for purpose i.e. structural or asbestos reports, but have never received them. Perhaps the BBC and Sir Robin could tell us why these tower blocks are good enough for the BBC, but not good enough for Newham residents.

Or, as another message board poster on another site puts it, summarising the situation quite neatly:

The BBC news studios during the Olympics are on top of a council-run block of flats in Stratford. Residents were moved out with relatively short notice and some were moved out of London so that the studio (and affiliated offices needed to run the studios) can be set up and have tight security. I am sure they could have just installed a rooftop camera and have it as a back drop for much less cost and displacement of people. So much for this being the people's Olympics!

The BBC has been at pains in the past to report on the displacement of (for instance) the unfortunate inhabitants of Beijing who were displaced by the totalitarian dictators of China to make way for the Birds’ Nest stadium. But they have been strangely silent on the people from the Carpenters estate who have been displaced by the totalitarian dictators of the BBC.

Or, indeed, the homeless who have been displaced and re-located for the Olympics by Westminster Council’s appalling practice of “wetting down the streets” – sending water carts round at night to soak rough sleepers and their bedding in an attempt to make them get up and move. Obviously it’s not quite so drastic a solution as the Greek authorities employed when they went round Athens in the run up to their games shooting all the stray cats, but when it comes to The Blight and their acolytes, nothing would surprise me.

One thing we can be sure that the BBC won’t be reporting on, is the insidious threat to civil liberties represented by the Olympics. These issues have been barely acknowledged, let alone discussed. In fact, if you were so unwise as to demonstrate publicly against the Olympics, you may find yourself in receipt of one of the Olympic Asbos, as happened to Simon Moore in his attempt to protest against the use of Leyton Marshes for the use of basketball training. In a statement outside court on 18 June, he said:

''The effect of this ASBO is to criminalise peaceful protest. There are legitimate issues for concern around the Olympics such as the destruction of Leyton Marsh in East London for a temporary basketball training facility and the ethics and human rights records of corporate sponsors for the games. These punitive and coercive measures will not stop us from peacefully protesting or from doing what is right.''

Because of our appallingly misguided foreign policy adventurism since 2001, we have done everything we can to fuel Islamicist fanatics at home and abroad. And as a result of this, of course, the Olympic Games are a prime target for any beardy weirdy nutter Jihadist to have a go if they think they’re hard enough.

When you have people writing to the papers (as reported recently by Yasmin Alabhai-Brown) suggesting that for the security of the games, all Muslims in London should be interned for their duration, clearly the English Defence League has nothing to fear – LOCOG have obviously been doing their work for them.

The big story on the security agenda of course is the failure of part time outsourcers and full time skimmers and chancers G4S to recruit or train enough staff to fulfil their contract for meters, greeters, electronic-wand-wavers and friskers. Thus necessitating the call-up of various units of the armed forces, some of whom are still war-weary from Afghanistan. What everyone would like to know, of course, is when exactly Theresa May knew that there was a problem. Because it once more abuts on the “Jeremy Hunt” defence. Was she really not in control, or was she merely practising selective amnesia? I must admit I find it very difficult to believe, from my own knowledge of running government fulfilment contracts, back in the days when I used to do it, that nobody asked “how are we doing?” I used to have to report on progress in person during update meetings every other month, and provide monthly stats. Are we really to believe that there was no such monitoring process in place over the G4S security guards, and if there was, and it pointed to a shortfall in recruitment, did nobody think to tell Theresa, or did she not think to ask? Erring on the charitable side, there are questions about her competence, even assuming she was telling the truth about what she knew and when.

The security operation for the Olympics is massive, of course, and it, too, has implications. With tanks on the streets, missiles on the roofs of tenement blocks, and a warship anchored in the Thames, as has been wryly observed elsewhere, any foreign dictator from a totalitarian regime visiting London for the Games will feel very much at home.

On one level, again, it is easy to poke fun at this over-egging of the pudding, which arises in part because the government is terrified of being pilloried in the press for lax security if something does go wrong. But of course, it’s the wrong security, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And it comes at a risk to our freedoms. Al Qaida are not noted for their proud naval traditions stretching back to the time of Nelson, although maybe they have recently got hold of a RIB from somewhere and been practising at the Kabul Lido. No, what this is all about is getting us used to these sorts of sights, getting us to acquiesce to the paraphernalia of a security state for our “own good” and making sure nobody asks too many awkward questions about whether it’s necessary or why it has to be there in the first place.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Al Qaida, or some flake-off nutjob splinter group of Al Qaida, was planning to have a go at the games. As I said above, we’ve gone out of our way to prod the hornets’ nest of Islamic fundamentalism with a stick at regular intervals since 2001, and the twisted and sick minds who plan bomb outrages might see it as a neat “bookend” to the London bombings of 7/7, the day after the award of the games to the city. But, as Ken Livingstone has pointed out, you don’t catch Al Qaida by chasing them in a warship or a tank, you don’t catch them by firing a missile off the roof of a tower block in Poplar, you catch them by intercepting clandestine messages, electronic intelligence, patient casework, and surveillance, if it must be done at all. And in an ideal world, you do it without impinging on the freedoms and civil liberties of the rest of us. Sadly, however, since 2001, the terrorist threat, real and perceived, has been used by governments of both major parties (and the Liberal Democrats) to support legislation intended nominally to counter “terrorist” threats, but which has had grave implications for the freedoms we all used to employ.

And this is my real fear about the Olympic security issues: once you get used to the idea that you have to have an increased security level, once you get used to the idea that there must be tanks on the street for increased public safety, you’re well on the road towards building a barbed wire fence all around the coast of Britain, with gun turrets at regular intervals. Because none of this stuff ever gets repealed, you see. They bring in “emergency legislation” which allows them to “cleanse” the streets of the homeless, which allows them to prohibit this, and restrict that, and enter the premises of anyone suspected of committing counterfeiting against the interests of the Olympic sponsors; they bring in legislation to prohibit protest and public displays of disaffection; they even selectively arrest and detain “potential troublemakers” as happened to the performance artists who planned to burn the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in effigy on the day of the Royal Wedding last year, and then that’s it. It all stays on the statute book, for ever and ever, amen. And so our ancient freedoms of free speech and of legitimate, peaceful protest, are criminalised and taken away from us, step by stealthy step.

You may not agree with the idea of burning the Royal Family in effigy. I am not particularly in favour of it myself. But arresting someone before they commit a crime or because they might commit a crime is a development which I find even more disturbing than the thought of six nutters in a park burning a tailor’s dummy dressed in a wedding gown. Six nutters who could always in any case have been arrested and charged after the event, if it was considered they had actually committed a crime, and subject to the due process of the law, rather than being preventatively incarcerated.

We’ve already had the first political hissy-fit of the games, as well, with the North Korean women’s football team walking off the pitch when South Korea’s flag was shown on the big screen. The fact that the North Korean women’s football team and Kim Wrong-Un are probably the only people in the world who would have noticed the difference is neither here nor there. It happened. And it really shouldn’t have, in an event that has been seven years in the planning and the micro-management.

The degree of planning, for instance, which has been evident in the Olympic torch relay. I’ve said my piece already in other places about the cost of the security implications, having Metropolitan Police officers jogging through the streets of Penzance and Aberdeen to prevent anyone from getting too close to the torchbearers: you can join in, but only up to a point. The presence of police in areas that they aren’t normally territorially “responsible” for is linked to the issues around the presence of foreign security officials, some of them armed, on the streets of London and elsewhere, during the games. This has been a concern of mine since the Chinese army goon squad ran through the streets of London with the previous torch. Who controls these foreign security operatives? What are their rules of engagement? Can they draw weapons and open fire? Under what circumstances, and at what risk, to UK citizens?

I’ve also written before about the way in which the media, especially the local media, seeks out the halt and the lame and the “human interest” stories of the torchbearers. I can just imagine the planning meetings when they all sit round the newsroom table trying to decide if the film of someone who had his legs blown off in Afghanistan is more tragic than a child victim of leukaemia carrying the torch. Although disabled people are only useful up to a point – they are corralled off into their own “special” Olympics, which receives nowhere near as much attention or coverage as the “real” ones. [This is not to denigrate the actual torchbearers, by the way, who are probably genuinely proud and justifiably regard it as an achievement in their own personal terms. It’s not for me, but it means something to them. What I object to is the way in which they are exploited for sentimental effect, particularly the injured military, who are used as another stick with which to prod us into a more “patriotic “ stance].

The patriotic stance (which in their terms means approving everything The Blight does, from engaging in needless and costly wars, to causing unemployment hardship and havoc at home) was never more evident that the speech of Boris Johnson to the massed crowds in Hyde Park on the penultimate day of the Olympic torch’s progress. Apart from the advances in film technology, anyone switching on in the middle of the BBC news coverage of the events could have been forgiven for thinking it was coverage of Hitler and the Nazis cavorting before the 1936 Berlin Games.

And so, as I write this, on the eve of the event itself, we find ourselves in a locked-down security state where the privileged can sweep through the capital in specially designated traffic lanes and patriotism has become compulsory. This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing we used to deride good old communist Russia for. Smile and wave the flag, comrade, or you vill be shot.

I sort of feel sorry for the athletes, some of them, at least, who only get the chance to demonstrate their rather obscure hobbies on world TV once every four years. But even there, it’s difficult to tell these days which performances are natural, and which are chemically assisted. Anyway, I hope they manage to have some fun, despite the ghastly sinister meaninglessness of it all.

It all seems a very long way away from the original concept of Baron de Coubertin, of a festival of international peace through athletic prowess, not to mention the ideals of the Ancient Greeks. Or even the Ancient Geeks. And talking of geeks, and looking at the list of sponsors, I was surprised to see that Microsoft was absent, because, to be honest, if ever there was something that WOULD actually benefit from Microsoft’s mindless, monolithic determination to re-set everything back to the original defaults, completely regardless of any subsequent modifications, it’s the bloody Olympics.