Posts Tagged ‘london 2012’

Tired of Great Britain languishing near the bottom of the Olympic medals table? So am I. That’s why I’ve created the adjusted medals table.

This takes the so called official medals table and reconfigures it so that Great Britain’s medal count includes all the countries we used to own. This includes all the Commonwealth countries such as Canada, all the former colonies such as the United States and even countries we just invaded a large part of, such as France. I feel this is a more accurate reflection of our sporting legacy.

Oh, and if you do it this way, we’re doing very well!

I wasn’t going to write about this, but so many people have now mentioned it to me that I’ve decided it is worth while commenting after all…

It’s now been six months since Lloyds TSB started the processing of correcting the account they had incorrectly set up and then started billing our charity for. They’re still working on it. After all this time, you really have to wonder if they ever will get it done.

This is a bank of truly incompetent scale – no wonder they had to sell 77% of it to the government as part of a £37,000,000,000 bailout from public funds to the major banks. That’s about £800 each btw.

So what did such a bank do with all it’s ill-gotten gains from hard-working taxpayers?

They spent £40,000,000 sponsoring London 2012. As if the tax payer hadn’t paid enough for the Olympics already, Lloyds TSB are now taking our emergency bailout money and spending it on making itself a sponsor of London 2012!

Not only that, but this is only the money paid for the sponsorship deal – and one imagines that the expenses of having a party bus follow the Olympic torch around and anything else rack up to quite a bit. In fact, they’ve even made a website about everything their blowing money on this summer.

It’s absolutely unbelievable.

Hosting the Olympics has been a harsh affair. We’ve had to temporarily (hopefully!) transformed into a semi-totalitarian state.

But on the flip side, we get to go to the Olympics. Or do we?

The Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. So even if you allocate a rather large amount of 800 tickets to sponsors and other interests in the private sector, that still means we can sell 99% of tickets to the generic public. But apparently not. Only 75% of the tickets have gone on sale to the general public. When it comes to the high profile events, that already rather low number of 75% drops to 35%!

But, of course, you have to give some to the private sector. They’re paying for the games after all. Otherwise, the tax payer would have to foot the bill. But, as it turns out, and we all knew already, we are footing the bill.

According to the Guardian, sponsors have contributed £1 billion of funding. They’ve made the data available for free too. The Guardian is actually being generous here – a report by Parliament puts the figure even lower.

Meanwhile, the total cost was reported to the House of Parliament as being around £12 billion. Jules Boykoff points out this isn’t entirely accurate though and, indeed, according to Sky Sports, the figure is actually around the £24 billion mark.

So do the maths on that one. We’re footing 92% to 96% of the cost, yet we’re getting 35% – 75% of the tickets.

We often joke, in a Daily Mail satirical way, every time a new law or rule of social etiquette comes in that in any way infringes on our freedom, that it is “like living in Nazi Germany.” Indeed, usually, the incident in question is something far more benign.

But living through London 2012, suddenly all the joking has turned very sour. We are faced with an attack on the liberties that are at the heart of modern Britain – our very right to freedom of expression is under attack.

As part of hosting The Games our government is required to bow down to the IOC and introduce custom legislation to allow them to protect the brands of their sponsors. That is why, as the Guardian points out, it is a criminal offense for Victoria Pendleton to mention any non-sponsor brands during The Games.

But it gets much worse. Do you think that it might be a good opportunity to raise awareness for your charity’s campaigning issues? Tough look, police, or even private individuals working for The Games will be able to enter your private property, including your home, and remove any offending material.

If this is the cost of hosting the Olympics, on top of the £24,000,000,000 we’ve already spent, I’m not buying.

UPDATE: I penned this a few weeks ago. Since then, this morning it emerged the military will be providing even more troops (an extra 3,500), on top of the 13,500 that apparently they’ve already promised! Talk about a police state.

The surface to air missiles the army have started installing on people’s roofs is also rather alarming.