Just Say No

Five waves of the flag, a toss of his flaxen locks and it was done, London had officially taken over from Beijing as the next Olympic city. Boris looked only a little flustered and the eight minute exhibition showcasing British culture managed not to be quite as embarrassing as had been forecast by some, although it was decidedly underwhelming in comparison with the extravagant pageantry of the closing ceremony. Still what can you expect in only eight minutes and with a mere £2.5 million to play with?

The 29th Olympiad is a hard act to follow, even while recognising that there had been a dark side to the Beijing Olympics. However no point in dwelling too much on the negative, like the human rights abuses in today’s China. The point is to look forward to London 2012 and concentrate on the legacy “we” will leave to the world of sport after the London games have drawn to a close. Boris Johnson said as much when he promised, before flying back from Beijing, that "tens of millions of pounds" will be spent to coach and prepare children for the London games. The Mayor proclaimed that the Olympics would provide "a massive sporting legacy for London" saying he wanted to "ring-fence" the London Development Agency (LDA) for sport to provide the required facilities and the coaching and training opportunities for upcoming young athletes. David Beckham expressed similar hopes.

So why are so many people moaning about rising costs and the disruption to the capital in the four years ahead? Or like Will Self in his Evening Standard column, who opined that "What the Olympics are truly all about is money, nationalism in patriotic garb and a spurious kind of self congratulation." Indeed. Or are those of us who have been pointing to the flaws in the whole enterprise and directing people's attention to the very real social and economic problems already appearing in the areas around the Olympic site, just a lot of brutal kill-joys out to wreck people's enjoyment of a fantastic celebration of sporting prowess?

Well, according to one report: "There is no doubt that the Olympics will bring about permanent change to the economy of East London, the question is what kind of change? Here lies the challenge. The problem is that previous Olympics have failed to help the most economically disadvantaged groups living in the area where the Games have taken place. In the UK, flagship regeneration projects in East London and elsewhere have also failed to improve the well-being of local residents. The Docklands development is the most glaring example."

Will the London Games be any different to "previous Olympics"? From the viewpoint of the present moment it doesn't look like they will. Protest groups are active in Stratford and areas around the site. People are mourning the loss of the Manor Gardens allotments which last year were dug up to make way for an access road to the stadium, a wonderful resource enjoyed and productively worked for generations gone in a matter of hours. A football field where local children played also ploughed up in the interests of "big" sport. So much for the value of healthy outdoor exercise and governmental exhortations to eat the required five a day fruit and veg!

Residents of flats and low rent housing are fighting to protect their homes, not knowing if any compensation offered will be sufficient to pay for homes elsewhere. Exploitative and dangerous labour conditions are another issue. Previous Games including Athens and almost certainly Beijing, have been paid for with the lives of workers killed in the hurried completion of stadia and other facilities. There are also serious environmental concerns and worries about cost, £9.5 billion so far and rising. Causes for complaint? I should think so.

Team GB returned yesterday to tremendous acclaim - quite right that they should be congratulated on their record-breaking haul of medals. When the medal euphoria wears away those who don’t agree with the official consensus that the Olympics will be a terrific boon and benefit, will have to be written off as saddos in need of urgent rehabilitation. But as the British government doesn't have the luxury of the Chinese authorities’ sledgehammer methods of rule, so more subtle methods of "persuasion" will have to be employed. A conformity of opinion will have to be instilled through the media, advertising, enthusiastic endorsements of elite athletes and the active collaboration of sporting bodies. The healthy scepticism of the British public will need to be smothered for the duration of the preparations for the Games to the final triumphant hosting of the 30th Olympiad. Keep the momentum going and the distractions coming.

Resistance needn't be futile however. Increasing numbers of people are pointing to uncomfortable truths and exposing the commercial interests, elitism, arrogance and corruption surrounding the Games. So we needn't be afraid of expressing criticism or of questioning the need for the Olympic spectacle. Sport is good, international sporting events can be valuable in fostering cooperation and understanding between peoples but do we really need this four-yearly over-financed, bloated, ultra-capitalist monstrosity that is the modern Olympics foisted on us in exchange for the dubious privilege of being able to say "The Olympics came to London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt that fell apart in the wash and to top it all, I can't even find anywhere to ride my bike"?

Fiona Harrington

The surveillance Olympics

If gold medals were awarded for surveillance, then Britain will win a hatful at the 2012 Games. The Metropolitan Police hopes to use no fewer than 500,000 CCTV cameras to police the 2012 Olympics Games in London. All of its own cameras, numbering a mere 10,000, will be pooled with traffic, congestion and other cameras across the city to create a network, the BBC reports. This network “would be operated from a command centre, in London, by military, police and intelligence services … It is understood the command centre would remain in place after the Olympics”. Just like that!

And the plan does not stop with the cameras. The Met’s head of special operations Tarique Ghaffur, has outlined a number of other measures: the division of London into three security zones to make the arrangements more effective; the use of three helicopters for close surveillance during the games; an automatic number plate recognition system; and the issuing of tickets that are linked to the identity of buyers, whereby a spectator “will be tracked from the venue to his or her home with these tickets”. Ghaffur also promised a conference in Abu Dhabi that there would be stringent checks, including biometric fingerprinting for the 40,000 workers building the venues.

All this represents another big lurch towards the police state that even some respectable commentators are warning about in the capitalist press. The London Olympics, for the police, the military and the spooks is an irresistible opportunity to test out new ways of monitoring and controlling a population. The state, in a period of crisis and uncertainty, like that of today, constantly seeks to re-arm and strengthen itself. Led by New Labour, the forces of the state try to turn every event or feared event into an excuse for taking away the freedoms of people and raising their own powers. The so-called,“terrorist threat” becomes the pretext for new restrictive laws and mass surveillance that actually leaves aside the real causes and issues around terrorism.


All these measures are preparation for something other than terrorism, however. The ruling and political classes understand very well that as mortgages, fuel bills and food prices rise and as the financial crisis intensifies and workers lose their jobs, there will be upheavals. The history of this country shows time and again that the masses will defend their rights and their liberties and that is why the state is tooling up with cameras on every corner and database-driven ID cards.


The Games themselves over the last 30 years or so have become more and more an arena for the big corporations to advertise themselves and to market their products and less and less of a genuine sporting spectacle. The media companies, who broadcast to 3.9 billion people at the last games in Athens, also make a killing.

Athletics, the main sport at the Olympics, is hopelessly compromised by drug-taking, leading to scandals, lawsuits and phoney results. The 2012 games will cost at least £10bn (rising all the time), apart from the security bill. Many people and small businesses in East London have been forced out of the area, and arts and community projects have been starved of funds, as lottery money is channelled to the Olympics.

And yet a different scenario, a not-for profit Olympic Games without corporate sponsorship, is not hard to imagine. Sport, released from the orbit of the profit-hungry mammoths, would re-discover some of its old values and sportspeople, free from the pressures of winning at all costs, and in a different cultural environment, would soon learn to eschew drugs.

The games would ultimately be owned, controlled and organised by the athletes, the fans and the local community. Their organising committee could of course call on the same experts, planners, designers, architects and others who are doing the work now, but, freed from the agenda of the globalised sports industry and governments that support big business, the games would soon become a different - and uplifting – event, without the sinister and pervasive security that is going to be a feature of the London games.

Peter Arkell

The sweatshop Olympics

There will be celebrations in China today to mark the one-year countdown to the start of the 2008 Olympic Games. But it will be business as usual for the hundreds of thousands of workers slaving away in factories making products associated with the games. Research into four of the factories supplying goods under licence for the Beijing Olympics has revealed massive labour rights abuses, including child labour, forced overtime, workers being instructed to lie about wages and conditions to outside inspectors, poor health and safety conditions, excessive hours of work and employers falsifying employment records. These are the findings in a report from the International Textile Garment and Leather Workers Federation (ITGLWF) entitled Playfair 2008.

The Beijing Olympics are likely to be the most profitable ever. Adidas paid between $80-100 million for its sponsorship deal. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has signed up 11 main sponsors paying $866m million between them. The official website boasts that Olympic licensing provides successful companies with an opportunity to “gain considerable profit through producing or selling the licensed products” and “enhance brand image and increase market share and sales”. The sale of the mascot alone will bring in more than $300m in profit.

Quite apart from the Olympics, China’s export success is based on paying low wages. Around 250 million Chinese (16.6% of the population), live on less than $1 a day and 700 million (47% of the population), live on less than $2 a day. Chinese workers are not free to form independent trade unions and can only join official organisations that are part of the bureaucracy that rules China on behalf of a corrupt elite.

International brands manufacturing in China claim their “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) policies are the answer. But the CSR audits are in the main meaningless and easily subverted. Neil Kearney, ITGLWF General Secretary, said: “The Olympic Committee must now remedy the abuses that have been uncovered. Child workers must be removed from the workplace and sent to school at the companies’ expense. Workers must be repaid the monies they are owed in respect of underpaid wages and unpaid overtime. And immediate measures must be taken to bring working conditions into line with national legislation and international labour standards, including the payment of the legal minimum wage and respect for laws on working hours.”

But the IOC has consistently rejected all attempts to force it to take responsibility for employment standards for workers employed in Olympic activities. Their sole criteria is to bring in cash to fund the overblown, drugs-polluted, orgy of corporate power the games have become. According to its charter, the goal of the Olympic movement is “to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play”. But the children working in the sweatshops of China are clearly not going to have the chance to experience any of that.

Penny Cole, environment editor

Making liberty history

On top of the fact that the 2012 Olympics project is resembling a typical New Labour disaster, which Londoners in particular will have to pay for, comes more sinister news about how the state plans to use the cover of the Games to further erode citizens’ rights. Officials want to make wider use of the police's DNA database to identify suspects through their relatives. The plan is also to give police the powers to scan postal packages to find drugs and to monitor an individual's progress in even greater detail than they can today. This will be achieved by using CCTV technology as well as electronic travel passes such as the Oyster cards used by millions of Londoners. The memo debates how public opinion could be won over and concludes: "Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics." Three million people already have their DNA stored on a national database, and the state is aiming for comprehensive coverage whether people have been convicted or not. Home Office officials want to make much greater use of a technique known as "familial DNA" where a suspect whose details are not on the database can be traced through a family member whose details are already recorded. The memo states: "Records could be trawled more routinely to identify familial connections to crime scenes, providing a starting point to investigations through a family member that is on the database to a suspect that is not, for example."

The Home Office plans for the DNA database are surely only the tip of the iceberg. Millions of visitors are expected to attend the 2012 Olympics and the "security" issues are no doubt uppermost in the minds of the police and MI5 as they contemplate another phase of their "war on terror". A ring of steel will be thrown around the Olympics, undoubtedly involving the army as well as the police. Surveillance will be increased on a massive scale, involving new techniques. Once the Games are over, they will remain in place and become part of the authoritarian state that has emerged in the last decades. The leaked DNA memo makes clear the official attitude to basic rights, referring to the "expectation of liberty" that people have rather than anything permanent. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, accused Home Secretary John Reid of manipulating the London Olympics for political ends as part of what she called his "make liberty history" campaign. Add in the spiralling cost of the Games, and it is increasingly doubtful whether anyone, apart from the state and a few corporate sponsors, will benefit from the 2012 Games the way things stand.

Paul Feldman, communications editor