Posts Tagged ‘olympics’

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.

If there is one thing we need to be embarrassed about as a nation, it’s Sunday trading laws (you know, if you ignore complicity in torture, public transport, lack of a constitution, etc). Some of us need to be able to buy baking ingredients at 3am on a Sunday. I say as a nation, but I don’t wish to tarnish Scotland’s good name with this as they have long since abolished such nonsense.

I for one am very excited about the start of the Olympics, as it means these restrictions will be temporarily suspended to allow businesses to cash in on the hype as much as possible.

How this really works I’m not sure. I could understand if the limits were just being relaxed in London around the Olympic Village, but they’re not, they’re being relaxed everywhere. Why? What is the point of allowing B&Q to open until 10pm on a Sunday in Newcastle, during the Olympics? But as I said, I’m not complaining. It’s incredibly irritating having my Sunday shopping limited to 11am-5pm.

The question is though – once we do this for the duration of the Olympics and see that we can indeed buy a loaf of bread and a mango from Asda at 7pm on a Sunday without god smiting us, what is the argument for bringing such restrictions back into place?

Of course you can argue that we should have one day a week where shops are closed so people spend time with their families (which is of course strictly forbidden at all other times; god help you if you wanted to have family time on a Wednesday) but if this is the case, how does this fit into letting shops open for the first six hours? The answer is, it doesn’t, nor so it fit with the idea that only large stores are restricted from opening on a Sunday while smaller shops, offices, call centres, pubs, restaurants and many, many other business types do open because whether we like it or not we’re now living in a 24/7 society (and I do like it).

Sunday trading laws need to go the way of fox hunting and smoking in pubs – an archaic practice that is detrimental and unjustifiable in modern society.

Having said all that, I didn’t watch a lot of the Olympics mainly because it just annoyed me. We seem to have been a bit too happy, smiley, everything is fine with China. Let’s review a few of the news stories that came out during the games.

The fireworks were pre-recorded.

Nobody turned up so they rounded up groups of students to make the stadiums look full.

To construct the new venues they bulldozed people’s houses with compensation.

People’s families suffered due to the people being involved in the games being taken away to camps so they couldn’t look after their families.

The fancy trains that said “made in China” on them were actually made by a company in Canada – who were ordered to de-badge them and put “made in China” on them in an attempt to stop people associating said term with crap quality. When in fact, of course, it is, hence why they went to Canada for their trains.

They spent a third of their GDP on the games, rather than feed their people.

They decided the young girl who was singing was too ugly so they hid her behind a curtain and put a better-looking girl out there miming.

They managed to perform the closing ceremony without using any amplification on the drums.

They had people carrying “nothing to see here” boards on standby as seen when the Hungarian weightlifter bent his arm back.

Their no doubt equal and fair selection process for the hundreds of people dancing in the stadium somehow presented any overweight or even slightly imperfect people from appearing.

Finally, the coordinator for the ending ceremony of the Olympic games said the western world couldn’t do amazing ceremonies like China did because…

• We respect human rights
• We have no dicipline and stop every 15 minutes for coffee breaks
• We only work 4 and a half days a week
• We aren’t willing to suffer enough
• However he does complement North Korea on their ability to stage such performances.

Did I miss anything?

There are a few things I want to talk about here. We need rather well I thought. Russia beat us to 3rd place in end but but 4th for Britain is really good, after all if there is one thing we are good at it is losing at sports.

Anyway, syncronised diving. It’s not a real sport is it? I mean seriously, you’r just jumping into a pool at the same time. It’s not big and it’s not clever. It’s very good to do at some kind of swimming club with 7 year old kids but an olympic sport? Of course not.

Also, London 2012, how are we supposed to follow this? Well anyway it’s irrelevant as we’re not even going to try. There is already talk of how we are going to hold a more “intimate” games, which basically just means less impressive.

And what was our closing ceremony about? It did have some rather nice features but it was spoilt for me by the fact that the big red bus we had, turned up on time. I don’t really feel that sums up British culture. Oh and the commentator accidentally called Leona Lewis a “superstar.” Finally, in case we hadn’t lost all self respect we ended it with “here’s David Beckham, he’s not going to say anything we’re just showing off.”

Finally, I just want to be clear that the man we sent to represent us in front of the rest of the world – was Boris Johnson. Kept him away from Britain for a while I guess. It’s good to see I’m not the only person who actually uses my jacket pockets.

Good stuff.