2012 Olympics: UK Targets Moaning Gold

Stratford? Need a boost? Hang on a mo’...

...we’ve spent how long, precisely, ranting on about how good the Olympics will be for locals (the long term gains, think of all those facilities? You know, the ones that might outlast the short term cash influx that will go to big-nothing-to-do-with-home-grown-British-businesses-wot-are-global-enough-to-be-inclined-to-sponsor-the-Olympics, spent by tonnes of people that we all have to fund being here), while the South East continues to permit itself to be over-extended to the point of rudeness?

Meanwhile, some verily aces cities in this fair -(to middling at the moment, to be frank)- land have invested millions to try and detract from the uber-magnetic black fiscal hole that is London.

This has always been just like Prescott’s “let’s build on Thames Estuary flood-plains rather than think about where and why” malarkey all over again.

I’ve absolutely no problem with the UK hosting the Olympics, but don’t tell me that as a choice London is going to do the country any more favours than hosting it in brilliant, sorry BRILLIANT, under-served cities elsewhere. Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds (the list does go on)...a tonne of opportunities for facilities that would potentially level out the playing field.

IMHO, it was all a huge win for people that have money to get some more. And possibly the only way that we were going to get adequate funding for CrossRail, which will just add to London over-stretching itself and making itself an even more costly inevitable destination for people that really should be able to find the life and living they need without having to compromise their roots and kin.

And Londoners aren’t that enamoured with the prospect of subsidising it: well, we’re not all soft [in-the-head] Southern wotnots…

moves to a wireless equipped ranting hole on the fringes of the M25

All we are saay-ing is give noooorrrf a chaaaance

Posted 4 months ago by Jingle tipped with 1K

slaps jingles

A small point as its quite wearying hearing people take digs at the capital….’The uber-magnetic-fiscal-black-hole that is London’, generates around 35% of the UK’s GDP. This enables the UK government to, for example, fund regeneration organisations such as Advantage West Midlands, which supports locations like, er, Birmingham which has ‘invested millions to try and detract from the uber-magnetic black fiscal hole that is London’.

impales Prescott

Prescott wanker

Posted 4 months ago by UncleGeorge

Hauls Prescott off spikes, kicks, re-impales, and continues, standing (due to warmed cheeks)

I do take your point, but I think that’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. I fully appreciate that London is a major wealth generator for this country.

My point is that the relative returns start to become limited after a while, and we’ve got a ludicrously focused economy (both geographically and sector-wise) – which I find a bit risky (not risque, that would just be kinky).

I’m not against London at all (otherwise I’d have hauled my cookies elsewhere). But I do think it’s a shame that we’ve not let other cities’ economies grow so they can fund their individual and collective future growth. All power to London for helping to fund the Government’s funding of Advantage West Midlands, but that is seed money that should be allowed to bear fruit.

Going back to the topic though, I’m evidently not the only one that’s not really that enamoured with the Olympics in London, and I bet I’m not the only one that doesn’t really buy in to the proposed extent of these long-term benefits for us…to be frank, I always get a bit suspicious of the product if the marketing team’s gone overboard, in this case it just makes me suspect that there may be ulterior motives in the form of [easy] jobs for the boys.

retires to seek padding

Posted 4 months ago by Jingle

Looking ahead, It will be down to the media to tell us whether preparations for the Olympics are well in hand or woefully behind schedule; whether our athletes are at the peak of their powers or suffering from years or Labour/Tory underfunding; and, ultimately, whether London staged a world-beating extravaganza, sent an important ecological message to the world by not staging a world-beating extravaganza, or was responsible for the most disastrous, expensive flop in the history of the Games. Sorry, the ‘modern games’.

Precedent: Some Fleet Street editors and proprietors were kept waiting for the opening of the Millennium Dome on January1st 2000 and as a direct result the Dome received the most prolonged bout of vitriolic and negative reporting ever sustained by a national project.

When the lie is so big, people start to believe it. My prediction is that we will never really know how ‘successful’ the games turn out to be.

Posted 4 months ago by BraveNewMalden

I have quite enjoyed the coverage of the frugal-Olympics of (what was it – g’ahh! Oh, I’m online) ‘48.

I can imagine the folks in PR/Marketing re-positioning last minute to achieve said not extravaganza on the premis of environmentalistic environmentalism.

Everybody’s a winner: Construction workers get paid for unfulfilled contracts (but only at half rates, thus slowing unemploymentism during economic slowdown thus keeping B’ham’s sole chance of economic evolution alive, we retain an only moderately extortionate Council tax rate; carbon footprint is dwarfed by Sicily, obesity becomes a fundamental universal impossibility, non-London specks of civilization don’t lose out to London, whingers have a dilemma about what to whinge about, and economists, sociologists, psychologists and a lot of other “ists” will get grants for decades to come if they can even hint at the meaning of success.

Posted 4 months ago by Jingle