I attended part of the debate today on the Olympics. It was rather complacent – on time, within budget, legacy, culture, regeneration etc. etc. Lord Patten was one of the few to express the concerns that I feel, about, inter alia, transport, security and carbon emission. I have tried and failed to discover the total carbon emission cost of the Games, arising from the allocation, the travels of the selection committee, the buildings, the new transport links, the training and, above all, the extra tourism that has been and will be stimulated- and they will arrive by air. Noone knows the answer, possibly because it is unquantifiably enormous. Roads around London will be gummed up for weeks in the summer of 2012 because lanes will be reserved to get the “Olympic family” from one venue to another. Vast amounts will be spent on security, and we will be a magnet for terrorism throughout the Games. And it will all be over in a few weeks and shortly thereafter noone will remember who won the medals.
No doubt I am a Dismal Desmond, but why do we need this? We could regenerate East London for a fraction of the price. We could make the £6bn savings we need to tackle the deficit by axing the whole thing, except where we are already committed by contract. Would you rather forego the Olympics? or pay more in taxes and have fewer social services? Greece is where the Olympics started, and they have the facilities in place already. The Olympics should stay in Greece, as their natural home, thereby making full use of the existing structures and avoiding waste; and it might even help the Greek economy!
Using the same fundamentals as your argument – that promoting the Games is not a good use of public funds, generates tourism traffic, carbon emissions etc.: I hope you would also accept the withdrawal of all public funding from the arts? As well as direct subsidy, this would include the removal of police support which enabled Lord Pearson to show controversial films, and to marshal crowds at events like Proms in the Park. At the same time, you would want to close Visit Britain and would invite overseas tourism agencies to do the same. And let’s only build or upgrade public transport when it is clear that the business case shows positive values based on business and commuter traffic alone; trains run half full outside of peak periods so let’s cancel half of them and save on the electricity. And on the terrorism side of things – hundreds of millions of people around the world watch the Premiership, so we already survive terrorist magnets on a weekly basis.
I exaggerate for effect, as perhaps do you, but as a Londoner I am more than happy about the Games being in my city; I am looking forward to us being able to show off London to the world for a summer; our open and vibrant lifestyle makes us a magnet for terrorism already and we will not change how we live our lives to prevent that; as I cyclist and user of public transport I have no qualms about the traffic and welcome the upgraded services; and I look forward to seeing events which inspire me and others to participate in more sport, thus increasing activity levels and in the long run reducing the healthcare bill for this country.
A persuasive argument. But the arts in Britain are of historic and ongoing value and intrinsic worth – not a one-off burden for a few weeks. I am a daily public transport user, who has to wait for several underground trains to come and go before being able to wedge herself into one of them. I do not see that situation improving as a result of the Olympics. Terrorism seeks high profile events, and the Olympics fit that bill. Tourism in general is problematic. The population of the UK is always being urged not to fly unnecessarily and to conserve energy. At the same time, the UK encourages tourism into the country, little of which is by train. If we are serious about preserving the environment, then it has to work both ways. As for upgraded sport, let us start by reversing the sale of school playing fields and the discouragement of competitive sport at school. Does watching top sport encourage participation? Does watching the World Cup makes us healthier? I wonder.
Thank you for your prompt reply. From it can I assume that you have no problem with sport in general but simply oppose the festival of sport that is the Olympics? After all, many sporting events – Henley Royal Regatta, The Grand National, the 6 Nations – are as old as the great galleries in London and bring ongoing value to their communities and (in some cases largely amateur) sports.
On public transport – the Games will fall in the summer holidays, when the number of commuters falls. And hopefully the tourists/visitors will not be heading for the City and West End at 9am, or out to the suburbs at 5:30pm. And the Houses of Parliament should not be sitting.
I think we are agreed on tourism and promoting sport. On the impact of sport on participation, I suggest you contact Herne Hill velodrome and ask them how many people went to their taster sessions before Beijing 2008 and in the weeks after!
England’s home counties and greater London have in their history at least two world-leading gems concerning not just best and most-specialist knowledge of human-movement but all-round enablement insights for all kinds, ages and levels of people.
Firstly the home counties employed a certain world-leading, quantumly-insightful Movement-researcher Rudolf Laban from Switzerland, to help the Allies win World War 2.
A mere skim through his masterful little book “Effort”, composed using the added expertise of an engineer named Lawrence, would show to any reader how the most essential and useful of human-movements come from certain combinations of eight distinct elements, at least half of which do not require Olympic strength, speed, nor distance-covering.
In fact the misuse of any of the eight elements can result in imbalance and actual impairment of both quality and quantity of movement; and Laban included a sub-chapter describing this risk in some detail and showing how to redress that.
Laban also shows the construction of every kind of normal and economic human movement including its several derivatives.
WW2 having been won, the UK welcomed Laban and his ensuing development of a Human Movement teaching establishment in the home-counties, where he was immediately in demand, along with a new colleague Lisa Ullmann a dancer, choreographer and movement-therapist ( with whose help he composed his life’s major work “The Mastery of Movement” ) for many kinds of dance and artistic-expression movement expertise.
Thus he gave us English the world’s first major work on artistic i.e.’exaggerated’ human movement, as well as his first work on general and day-to-day normal healthy human movement alternatives and for distinctly-different economic-movement skilling, such as is required not simply for winning a war but during peacetime for succeeding in the workplace and, to a lesser extent as far as numbers of people involved goes, in games, athletics and Olympic-level human-movements.
(“Effort” by Laban & Lawrence).
Many years after Laban’s demise, a second world-leading human-movement expert came along, one Linda Hartley M.A., who as a result of studying the whole development of human movement from the womb through to advanced old-age, realised that there are parallels between the successive stags of human-movement development and the hugely longer-term evolution of the whole range of Life-movement on Earth.
She composed “Wisdom of the Body Moving”, and included therein instructions for re-visiting one’s own movement-development stages, and possibly for overcoming some kinds of impairment therein.
She too settled in the home-counties of England. and went on to write a masterfully higher practical-academic level text, “Somatic Psychology”.
The relevance, of all of the above to the Olympics, and to Britain’s forthcoming turn at hosting its great-happenstance, and therein to our noble lady’s choice of topic and of questions thereon, is I do submit that indeed the Olympics is of little if any use to us millions and billions of ordinary working human-beings [ since only a few thousand can be selected from us billions to specialise upwards into ultimate gold-medal expertise public and competitive performance levels ] but is essential collectively to the whole human-race.
Our own little UK already has a far more appropriate and better resource than the Olympic Games, for improving and making more safe the British Isles’s population’s movement range, and enjoyment thereof; and herein there awaits also a much wider range of accomplished human-movement expertise than the mere two I have included above.
Therefore, given a massive investment in Human Movement Learning and Practice Centres throughout Great Britain, [from which should be banned such ‘macho’ terms as ‘Gym’, ‘Work-out’, ‘Exercise-Equipment’ (and, although Josef Pilates’s is one of the additional expertises we can also turn to, all-night TV shopping’s “Pilates-machinery” definitely is not) and ‘Atlas body-building’ ], many of us British people would no doubt vote in favour of re-appointing Greece to be the continuous home-and-happenplace of the Olympic Games.
If I may, noble lady, one final biggish sort of word from my individual little self ?
When I had just entered the octogenarian-ile of human-life, I discovered that my own best-suited movement-venue is my single-bed where, whilst over the decades I had continually failed to learn ‘Yoga’ butt had nevertheless been finding inch-by-inch what Mark Whitwell in ‘Body-in-Balance’ defines as (‘)Your own yoga; only those of your own movements best-suited to your personal health and flexibility need to be discovered, by you yourself(‘).
Thus I now believe that my own Slow-Horizontal-Stretch-orama does me more good than all-night armchair marvelling at brightly coloured TV screen Olympics wonders and miracles does.
This then would be my vote, for the duration of the present Parliamentary term, anyway:
Yes; to ‘let the Olympics be held by its original creators, always in Greece’;
No; to ‘that might help the Greek economy’;
Yes; to ‘that indubitantly would help the Greek economy’;
{[( and thereby would help the economies and healths of all nations concentricly around Greece, around the whole World, and Yes! throughout all of Life upon this Earth, into the bargain ! )]}.
“octogenarian-ile of human-life, I discovered that my own best-suited movement-venue is my single-bed”
I do of course sincerely hope that JSDM will not start building walls and putting soft wall paper on his bed surrounds, nor put a small roof on, and that he may continue to write in such a useful way for some time to come.
7 hours per night is surely enough?
Baroness Deech,
The Olympic facilities in Greece are (sadly) not in place. Just six months after the Games there were already reports of their disintegration:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/mar/06/greece
And three years on, things sounded dire:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1036373/Abandoned-derelict-covered-graffiti-rubbish-What-left-Athens-9billion-Olympic-glory.html
Granted you could use this as an argument that the Olympics should have stayed in Greece in the first place, but it’s evident that at present they are not well placed to host them – even ignoring their financial situation.
Matt.
Sorry; in my previous re “A fast one”:
‘stags’ = ‘stages’; ‘butt’ = ‘but’.
I’m astonished that an environmental impact assessment is not made for the Games. These days one couldn’t build a supermarket without an EIA, why the Olympics?
Writing from North Wales, I could happily do without the Games, or, if they are to be in London (it was London, not Britain, that bid, as I remember), let London pay for them.
The last time London managed to land the Games was in 1948, immediately after we were all crippled by the cost of WWII. I wonder if it’s possibly to take out insurance against having London as one’s capital?
Nevertheless, one can think of some cost-cutting initiatives. For example, the opening ceremony, rather overdone in Beijing I thought, could just consist of Boris cutting a tape and shouting: “Last one round the track’s a sissy!”
And if we got the javelin throwing in the right place, we could considerably reduce the accommodation costs for athletes.
Coming as they will midway through enormous and painful public spending cuts, they are unlikely to aid social cohesion.
Still, we appear to have been stuck with them. In the words of Laurel + Hardy, another fine mess you’ve gotten us into (nothing personal, of course). So I suppose we have to make the most of them.
What is important, I think, is to take radical steps to improve the nation’s sense of ownership of the Games. At present, they’re coming across as London’s games, for which we are all expected to foot the bill at an extremely inconvenient time.
D’accord, Stephen Paterson, and Bravo !
Join us:
“Give the Games to Greece”.
GGG:Permanently.
A whip-round of all the participating Nations would quickly result in the best Olympic venue in the World, ever, and in pleasantly warm little Greece; and just think of the huge amounts of savings, which could go into progressive healthy-fitnessing of all peoples that on Earth do dwell.
Let all nations of the World pay a pittance each, for Greece to host the Games possibly every two years ?
Win-win-win-win-win-win-win !
JDSM’s thesis eventually comes round to Yoga,
which at its worst is a method of converting good Western Christians to Hinduism (!)and at best, the world’s best exercise regime.
Tai Chi is hugely popular now as well but that is a form of self defence,a martial art,as well as of exercise. Yoga is also sometimes also described in Hindu works as
a collateral of self defence.
Some of the golden requirements of Olympic sport, andany vigorous exercise?
Flexibility,
Speed,
Agility,
Stamina
Fitness
and many others.
I have enjoyed the wonders of Olympic sport for many years, and until last year paid for the privilege of sport on my TV. (I’ve now given up Home TV entirely.)I used the TV for no other purpose.
Most people involved with sport follow the exponents of their own disciplines or the ones which are closest to it, and they are a huge inspiration to health and fitness everywhere in the word.
I can not say the same about World Cup football or Rugby football or any other world cup sport. That has something to do with pride in the development of modern nation states as far as I can see, and/but the huge value of the Kenyan long distance runner income to Kenya can surely not be doubted?
Roll on a successful Olympic games in London, with no mishaps or any altercations at all.
Not even a thought of it! It will be a great success, but I fear we will have to do our best to lose more, out of bland hospitality, than we did in China last time round.
Ah!
1. Agreed that most pedagogically-taught or indoctrinated Yoga, like Tai Chi, has fish-hooks in it to ‘convert’ the trusting-vulnerable to some additional or other sub-culture.
2. Disagreed that JSDM’s general & individual human-fitness thesis comes round to Yoga.
Several opposites are the case:
I beg to fluff this out with a few more premiss-ingredients:
(a) Lords-2012 Olympics ‘Debate’: maiden-speech by crossbencher Baroness Grey-Thompson, erstwhile repeatedly multi-medal Olympic champion athlete: (“)Sport is a microscopic society(“).
(b) Similarly the Olympics is a microscopic society.
(c) Olympic Games do not meet the real-holistic fitnessing needs of any of the molecular- and macro- societies outside of that Olympic microscopocity.
(d) Capital and fiscal-level consumer-market monies ‘saved’ by promoting microscopic Greece to “Permanent World Host for the Olympic Games” status, would meet the fitnessing needs of all non-professional and all ordinary levels of all people, even including of many medically-unfit people.
(e) Into the bargain, the Games could become ‘hype-free’, and become a much healthier ‘armchair’ or ‘horizontal-stretch’ exercise enhancer.
(f) Britain is already ahead of the rest of the small-nations of the bigger world in having a rich history and embryo-infrastructure for health-enhancing quality human-movement for all (JSDM’s Rudolf Laban and Linda Hartley bit);
and that infrastructure could be ubiquitated throughout the British Isles out of our savings from GGG (because with all nations contributing but a little-but-adequate amont of money to a single kitty for GGG, each nation will have a huge amount left over for establishing similar fitnessing-infrastructure to Britain’s imminent Holistic Human Movement Learning and Practice Facilities of Great Britain.
(Havn’t suggested “of the United Kingdom” because an alarmingly growing number of people want us to be truthful and call ourselves The United Queendom).
(g) [therefore (g) is a major sub-conclusion following from the above so far]:
GGG – Give the Games to Greece.
3a. Phew !
3b. Beg leave to take a breather, a bottle of water, and a hobble around the nearest neighbourhood park.
I suspect the answer to this lies in whether one thinks having the Olympics and other events like the World Cup bring people together in a way which makes war less likely.
War is not going to be disappearing anytime soon – but if this money, which is a fraction of the defence budget, has helped prevent, defer or delay one conflict then it might be worth it.
But such a hypothesis is hard to prove – was it the Olympics which helped bring down the Iron Curtain, or Ronald Reagan ? One for a debate down the pub one evening possibly..
Can I come in? I better confess I detest sport and shall not personally be attending the games, more likely getting as far away as possible. But I was cheering with everyone else in our Health Authority offices in east London when the news came through that we’d got the Olympics. The point is that while it’s true there are better ways of spending £2 billion in regenerating east London, the truth is that the money would never have come into the area without these games. And when I drive past the Olympic site every week and see the various stadiums taking shape I feel quite excited about the jobs and activity it has already generated. What I am most concerned about, and Lord Mawson has been the most active in trying to ensure, is that there will be a lasting legacy of an improved environment, leisure opportunities and sporting facilities in this part of London to make a long term difference to people who live there. At the moment the legacy issue isn’t anyone’s key responsibility; the games will be a singular waste of money if we fail to get any legacy except white elephant stadiums.
I like Bedd Gelert’s optimistic notion that the Olympics are good for international relations; or are they possibly a bit like the Eurovision Song Contest, a rather divisive and nationalistic bean feast?
For some interesting information on the downside of the Olympics, try the following:
a) Page 21 of this OMCT human rights report which deals with the plight of Roma families displaced as a result of the Athens Olympics. The report estimates as many as 2,000 Romas may have been displaced and lost track of as a result of the creation of the Olympic infrastructure.
http://www.omct.org/pdf/OMCT_Europe/2004/OMCTreport_Definition_EU_301004.pdf
b) The Playfair Campaign, which has been pressing the International Olympic Committee to source its products ethically, instead of relying on migrant workers with poverty wages, excessive overtime and child labour, many quite possibly trafficked.
http://www.playfair2008.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=124&Itemid=65
c) At least six workers were killed in the creation of the Beijing infrastructure. Workers also got murdered for trying to unionise, working conditions were appalling and dangerous, money was deducted for inedible food, and some workers were never paid, according to Human Rights Watch:
http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/china0308_1.pdf
All this, I fear, somewhat dilutes the supposed spirit of the Olympics as a celebration of humankind.
I am rather surprised at the use of terrorism both in the original post, and in your reply, Baroness Deech, as a justification for not holding the games in London. I am sure that you are not suggesting that we give the games to Greece to align the terrorist bulls-eye over Athens rather than London. In that case, we might need to rewrite Virgil and warn the Greeks to be wary of gifts from the British. But more seriously, ought we to give up gathering together because of the possibility of a terrorist act? The scope of such a view surely extends beyond the Olympics. If the underground is already as crowded as your experience suggests, then, as we have seen to our cost, there is already ample scope for destruction and chaos; there is no need to wait. The Olympics will surely have extra policing, and a higher state of alertness. So far, we have not seen terrorists succeed in pulling off an attack under these circumstances. I do not suggest complacency, but I do think that it is possible to overstate the risk and fall victim to allowing terrorists to dictate our behavior. If this were not the case, would anyone use the underground?
The Games as a magnet for terrorism – don’t you remember Munich?
I am afraid I was in diapers at the time of Munich, so my memories of the event are not particularly strong. But perhaps I have not expressed my point very well. I agree that the Olympics is a magnet for terrorism. My point is that there is no shortage of such magnets, including the underground at rush hour, and the Palaces of Westminster. Every day, then, millions of commuters make an implicit risk assessment and judge the benefits of their journeys to be worth it. Since you advocate returning the games to Greece rather than abolishing them, I assume you see some value in what the Olympics represents, but that you do not feel the value justifies the risk. A priori, this is a respectable position, but so is the position of the individual who never goes through or to any location where large groups of people gather. It seems to me that for national occasions such as the Olympics we must find a balance between overconfidence and paranoia, and not treat terrorism as a one-size-fits-all justification. Naturally, we might disagree over where the balance point lies.
I would like to understand your position better here. Would you say that the present circumstances are exceptional and temporary, or do you feel that, terrorism being what is, we are now in a position where for the foreseeable future Britain ought never to volunteer to host an Olympics or a World Cup or a Commonwealth Games?
Surely you have heard about the massacre of 11 athletes and a policeman at the 1972 Munich Olympics? A film was made about it.
Given the UK budget deficit, no I do not think we should volunteer to host any major international sporting events, especially since no one can estimate the carbon emission cost. The World Cup does not seem to have been of great benefit to S. Africa (nor to us for that matter!)
“GGG – Give the Games to Greece.”
JDSM holds us in suspense until the end!
There are no semaphore undiplomatic messages to be handed out to the world as there supposedly were at Munich, I am glad to say.
“I detest sport”
I think this must be quite the most positive contribution to the discussion so far!
Baroness Murphy wins again! Heh Heh! Heh ! Heh! (That’s four; a championship record even for the noble baroness!)
Lord’s peoples;
GGG – Give the Games to Greece permanently;
keeping of course the central ownership in the United Nations.
Many great savings have already been listed on this website alone; and to these should be added the further advantage of concentrating all member-states’ Games-security fundings and practical-implementation efforts into just one small place permanently within one small country, where a financial, political or military take-over invasion could be made absolutely improbable..
It takes little imagination to mind-ise* the super-security that could be attained by concentrating the actual 4-yearly Olympic Games Get-Together Spectacular always in Greece.
One is not overlooking the possibly more practical version of GGG that would as it were ‘franchise’ the Games to Greece instead of ‘giving’ it; thus retaining overall control in the Olympic Games International Committee as a sub-department of the United Nations which should hold the overall ownership of such Common Essentials or Essentials-in-Common, of course.
However, were the Games to be more effectivised as a 3-yearly recurrence (and thus also better popularised & profitabilitised), then a 99-year lease option might prove preferable.
Records could be broken every three years instead of every four, thus quicker narrowing and turning in to a Credit the human-race’s evident overall ‘Fitness-Deficit’into the bargain.
Whatever further factors may be speculated, my lords and peoples, the case for permanently awarding the world-uniting spectacle of the Games to Greece becomes daily stronger.
*. To mind-ise = to use the whole of the mind, rather than just the eyes as in ‘visualisation’.