1555 Hrs GMT London Wednesday 29 April 2009
KHOODEELAAR! HAD TOLD the CRASS role playing, Crossrail hole scam-inviting clique o Tower Hamlets on 17 December 2008 that the 2012 staging was another item of evidence constituting vindication of the KHOODEELAAR! campaign against Crossrail agenda....
[To be continued]
From the web site of the London Guardian: by-lined to Simon Jenkins
Any fool can raise a tax. But it takes a gutless one to splurge it on this stuff
Austerity vanishes when it comes to the prestige projects saddled on Britain. Ministers fear the IOC more than the IMF
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Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 April 2009 23.00 BST
Article history
The barbarians are at the gates. Towers are falling, people are screaming, temple economists are rending their garments, gibbering with dread. And where is the prince at this time of trouble? He is walking in the garden of heavenly delight, feeding the sacred crocodiles. Here there is no credit crunch, only fountains tinkling money. While the citizens starve, the precious ones are fed. On them the gods will always shine.
London yesterday witnessed a surreal scene. The panjandrums of the International Olympic Committee came to town to congratulate Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling on spending so much money. The two of them were well up to the mark, on course to blow the £9bn required for the committee's 2012 Stratford extravaganza. Members were said to be mightily pleased with their humble servants.
These men do real public expenditure. Not for them the hospital trustee taxi or the school governor sandwich. They live in Geneva, wear designer suits, travel first class and expect lavish gifts. They want no vulgar parsimony. Even as the artillery of recession pounds the ramparts of Canary Wharf, the Olympic Development Authority within echoes only to the gurgle of public money vanishing down throats well-lined with bonus.
The Stratford site is up to speed. A stadium with no known after-use is rising to the sky. Money streams down gilded rivulets into the pockets of consultants and contractors (not athletes). Someone is reported to have just walked away with £5m for designing a "small businesses website" of little known effect. Lord Coe, vestal virgin on this acropolis, is purring with pleasure. He will deliver Brown the one thing an embattled ruler most craves: glory. Nero did bread and circuses. Gordon Brown may not do bread but he can do circuses.
Whatever Darling may have said on Wednesday, Brown is happy to show he can splurge on really stupid things. As yesterday's newspapers listed slashed budgets, there was no mention of sacred crocodiles. The rich are to pay an extra £2bn a year (with changed personal tax allowances), their pension funds £3bn. Another billion will be taken from petrol, and £2bn on drink and cigarettes. Assaults are to be made on defence, transport, culture, local government.
These are paltry sums compared with those devoured by the crocodiles. The NHS computer system, which nobody wants, is lost to audit somewhere north of £12.7bn. The project has seen suppliers come and go for years and is now out of control. It is merely a way for the NHS headquarters to mop up the extra sums that Blair and Brown boasted in 2000 that they would spend on health – and found it could not be spent. There is no reason for a single ward to go unstaffed or a single operation to be delayed as long as the NHS spends money like this.
The Home Office's "war on terror" ID cards continue to wander through the Whitehall undergrowth, gorging between £5bn and £19bn, according to estimate. The Trident submarine replacements are so far put at £20bn, plus £180m a year just to run. Brown's beloved aircraft carriers are postponed, but will apparently come in cheap, at a minimum of £3.9bn for two. The first three of Jack Straw's Titan prisons are budgeted at £2.3bn. In prisons there are no economies of scale.
At least these things will last. The reason why the Stratford Olympics stands proud is that its cost is gigantic and devoid of any purpose beyond chauvinist bombast. Even that could have been won at a fraction of the price. The sum of £9bn is the entire yield of the new 50% marginal tax rate between now and 2012. As they sign their cheques to the Inland Revenue, the rich can reflect that in three years' time every penny taken from them will have vanished in the fireworks. Put another way, the extra revenue from petrol, drink and cigarettes between now and 2012 will barely cover the cost of the games.
The IOC is still demanding that London "build in" obsolescence to its facilities, ensuring that buildings are so located and designed as to shriek "Olympics" and be useless for anything else. The Athens site is gathering weeds, and Beijing's stupendous stadium has yet to find another purpose.
The biggest scam is the proclaimed need for an "Olympic village", with detailed specifications that require costly conversion for re-use when the games are over. In Barcelona this cost was said to be more than that of building the village in the first place.
London was so euphoric when it beat Paris in 2005 that it rejected any idea of a low-cost games and ignored all pleas for budgetary discipline. Tessa Jowell, the relevant minister, summoned consultants and let them rip. Even so, the government could in good faith have summoned the IOC last autumn and told it the joke was over. Given the recession, London would still stage a games, but on a reduced basis, mostly using the Wembley stadium and other existing facilities.
There is still no private backer for the Olympic village, which should surely be wiped from the plan. So should the giant press centre, and the IOC's demand that Britain chop down Elizabeth I's tree in Greenwich park to give its horses a day's clear ride. There is plenty of summer accommodation in London for athletes and journalists. What was the point of building a special railway to Stratford if not to get these people back and forth? We managed in 1948.
While austerity is the talk of the moment, there is no such talk when it comes to prestige projects. In the hothouse of Whitehall, the Olympics are like grand weapons platforms, mainframe computers, super-jails and giant wind turbines. They are backed by lobbyists, project managers and industries fat on government contracts. They have publicity traction and spending momentum. They draw the government's name to the flame of celebrity.
Any fool can raise a tax or cut a grant. Labour backbenchers will cheer any project to sting the rich. It is easy to tell a local council to close a swimming pool or library, shut a drug rehab centre or stop training for prisoners. But it takes guts to sink a Trident submarine or clip a hundred million off an Olympic velodrome. It upsets the people ministers meet at dinner. They do not have such courage these days.
As we have seen in the response to the credit crunch, public money nowadays goes not to those with arguments but to those with influence. It goes not to those who can offer welfare to the public but to those who can offer relieving headlines to ministers.
I calculate that the six prestige projects listed above, none of which are economically productive, cost more in total than the revenue of all this week's tax increases for the next three years. The astonishing truth is that ministers are more scared of upsetting the IOC than the IMF.
When politics loses touch with reason, it runs for comfort to those who peddle glory.
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