Don't do it Wiggo!

Bradley Wiggins, heroic winner of the Tour de France, Olympic gold medallist and BBC sports personality of the year, with sideburns that help mark him out from the crowd, is reported to have accepted a knighthood. My message to him is simple: don’t do it Wiggo!

Don’t let us see a picture of you kneeling before the Queen to become Sir Bradley. Do what Olympic opening ceremony creator Danny Boyle has done and say “No”.

You were brought up by your mum in a small flat in Kilburn, north London. Your absent father’s passion for cycling rubbed off on you and the legendary Herne Hill velodrome in south London, was where you started out.

You became popular through your common touch, your rapport with ordinary people. So much so that the French took you to their hearts, especially when you made jokes in their language.

So why join the establishment? Why join the elite? Why help out the ConDem government, which is recommending you to Buckingham Palace? As US baseball fans might respond, “say it ain’t so, Wiggo”.

By turning a knighthood down you would be in the illustrious company of others who have rejected “honours”, which still include ludicrous anachronisms like the Order of the British Empire or the Colonial Police and Fire Service Medal.

Children’s author Roald Dahl and artist Lucien Freud are among those who have turned down honours. Painters Francis Bacon and LS Lowry (five times), the sculptor Henry Moore and novelist Aldous Huxley also said no.

Joseph Conrad, one of the greatest novelists of all time, turned down a knighthood in 1923 shortly before his death.

JG Ballard, the author of Empire of the Sun, turned down a CBE in 2003, saying: "It's the whole climate of deference to the monarch and everything else it represents. They just seem to perpetuate the image of Britain as too much pomp and not enough circumstance."

Poet Benjamin Zephaniah said he was surprised to be offered an OBE in 2003, explaining: "Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality."  

Late in 1969, John Lennon returned an MBE he had been awarded in 1965, with a letter saying: "Your Majesty, I am returning my MBE as a protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against 'Cold Turkey' slipping down the charts. With Love, John Lennon."

Listen, Wiggo. A knighthood is just flim-flam, a deception that is designed to incorporate you into the establishment. If you want to do some good – and I’m sure you do – then get involved in the campaigns to save school sport from death by a thousand cuts.

For example, the umbrella group Sport and Recreation Alliance has said the proposed new English baccalaureate would downgrade sport in schools and add to a "worrying" decline in the number of teenagers studying PE at secondary school.

The number of school students taking PE at GCSE level has dropped by a third in the last four years. Alliance chairman Andy Reed is worried that the new qualification will “marginalise sport and creative subjects”.

So Wiggo, instead of accepting the embrace of an institution you really don’t like at all, tell your story about how you kicked alcohol to become a great cyclist, how you learned to climb mountains so you could win the Tour de France, how you learned to speak French fluently.

There are many ways to inspire a new generation – taking a knighthood isn’t one of them!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Revolt grows against Moore sculpture sell off

Tower Hamlets is one of the worst areas for child poverty in the UK and one of the country’s poorest boroughs. So when Mayor Lutfur Rahman decreed that a publicly-owned iconic sculpture by Henry Moore should be sold off, he probably did not anticipate the furore that would result.

This Wednesday, a resolution is to be put to an open council meeting demanding that the sale should be put on hold. The motion is proposed by Labour councillor Denis Jones and seconded by Anwar Khan.

The motion says that the sculptor donated “Old Flo”, as the monumental seated woman is affectionately known, “to the people of Tower hamlets... because he believed that art is beneficial, and should be accessible to all, including the East End’s working class, not just those rich enough to be able to afford to own it.”

Moore, a miner’s son from Yorkshire, was inspired by the wartime experiences of the people of London’s East End, thousands of whom were killed in the blitz, including 172 in the horrific Bethnal Green tube disaster.

The proposed sale of the artwork, presently on loan to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, is a blatant breach of Moore’s wishes that it should inspire Eastenders recovering from the war. So much so that his daughter Mary, has joined Olympics ceremony director Danny Boyle, Tate director Nicholas Serota, artists Jeremy Deller and Rachel Whiteread, in signing a letter asking the council to reconsider.

But Rahman - who began political life in the Labour Party and was elected mayor as an independent in 2010 after his expulsion - and his cabinet member for culture Rania Khan, remain adamant that the sculpture must be sold off.

Their grossly philistine attitude is being shot down in flames. There is a groundswell of opposition, not only from local councillors, but also experts like Art Fund director, Stephen Deuchar. The Museum of London, Queen Mary University, the Friends of Christ Church at Spitalfields and a local school have all offered safe public sites to house the three metres tall, 1.5 tonne bronze.

Rahman’s ace card is that the possible £5-20 million receipt would plug the hole in council finances that result from government-imposed cuts.  But, in fact he was already pushing for the sale before the last round of cuts were announced.

And, even the maximum sales figure would hardly dent the council’s requirement to make £100m cuts by 2015 (Rahman’s own figure) and its predicted £44m deficit for 2016/17.

But the mayor appears to have public funds available for other purposes. Last week he offered £2m funding exclusively to faith groups to refurbish their premises, whilst ignoring an alternative option to make funds available to all community buildings.

Over 22,000 people are currently on the council waiting list and major overcrowding issues, but community and advice services are being cut to the bone.

Will Rahman listen to the opposition? Probably not. Opposing the sale, as some of the councillors are doing, may be too little and too late. In other parts of Britain, Labour councils, including Bolton and Bury, are also selling off their family silver with the same rationale as Tower Hamlets. In Brent, Labour is flogging off libraries

Historically, London’s East End has defied government cuts with outright resistance. In 1921, George Lansbury led the Poplar Rates Rebellion, in which 30 councillors (including six women) were jailed for giving funds to needy local people rather than sending it on to the London County Council.

A mass rebellion along these lines, against the sale of “Old Flo” as well as cuts to services and jobs throughout the country, should be item one on everybody’s agenda.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

The best and worst of London 2012

London’s Olympics sum up a great deal that is brilliant about modern Britain. But, as the first few days’ events are broadcast, some harsh realities are breaking through the extraordinary magic of the opening ceremony.

There can be no doubt that the magnificent pageant in the new stadium was a spectacular achievement. The script, choreography and orchestration of a cast of many thousands included computer-generated imagery with 70,000 “paddles” to create moving images around the stadium came together in a communal effort to make for a memorable display.

To stage the £27 million event, Slum Dog Millionaire director Danny Boyle put together an expert team including writer Frank Cottrell Boyce. He says that Danny Boyle created a democratic space where no one was afraid to speak out. The creative team “worked so closely they were practically a hive mind”.

The result was a vision of Britain free of bombast and full of imagination and humour. It was a compressed story of rural orgins to the satanic mills of the industrial revolution. Poet William Blake’s anthem, Jerusalem, sung by a deaf and hearing Kaos children’s choir, could not fail to move.

The frenetic energy of 19^th century capitalism was re-enacted by thousands of

performers dressed in poor workers’ outfits with black suited, top hatted bosses extracting their profits. The cranking up of four gigantic factory chimneys in the stadium was a high point as they belched out smoke. The account of history included trade unionists, workers  and suffragettes demonstrating for their rights.

Then there was the evocation of children’s stories like Peter Pan and Mary Poppins, as reality and fantasy sprang up in rapid sequence. The pageant seggued into the 20^th century with hundreds of dazzling white hospital beds, with comforting nurses seeing off frightening fairy tale monsters. It was enhanced by magically winged cyclists, decades of pop music, projected on to a domestic home, climaxed by Internet guru Tim Berners Lee and Grime singer Dizzie Rascal.

Some have criticised the ceremony’s thrust as too Marxist, left wing and multicultural. Tory MP Aidan Burley’s tweeted that the “it was “the most leftie opening ceremony” he had ever seen, and too overtly political and multicultural. (Cameron sacked Burley last year from his parliamentary post for attending a Nazi-themed party).

But after the euphoric dream back to reality. The spectacular sports performances could not hide large banks of empty seats, particularly in the best areas reserved for high price tickets and sponsors. Yesterday thousands of seats were left vacant even though fans had been told sessions were sold out. 

Embarrassed Locog organisers are desperately trying to fill seats with troops, students and teachers, but the cat was let out of the bag by culture secretary Jeremy Hunt who said that many of the sponsors and media members had not bothered to use their freebies. This was adding insult to injury considering that Britain’s leading black newspaper, the east London based The Voice did not get a single media pass and most Londoners could not obtain or afford admission.

And that’s not the only ugly aspect of the games. Tyrants from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, China, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Rwanda and Swaziland are being giving VIP treatment of course. Behind the Queen’s cuddly image is her real alliance with these monsters.  Such as Dow Chemicals who sponsored the stadium’s “wrap”. Dow was responsible for the death of thousands of slump dwellers in Bhopal, India.

Not to mention McDonalds, Visa and Coca Cola who, with the enthusiastic help of the state, have established a brand dictatorship in the Olympic zones. Or the police who can arrest at will, as they did with some 182 cyclists on Friday.

It is too early to say what the lasting legacy of the Games will be. But whilst London 2012 will go down as the most commercially dominated and undemocratic Olympics in British history, it also demonstrates the potential of resources combined with will and imagination. It’s well past the time when humanity needs freeing from the monstrous prison of corporatocracy.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Hypermarket nation trumps Danny Boyle's vision

Film director Danny Boyle’s central vision for the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony is a representation of idealised rural life, with cows and sheep grazing, and a ploughman at work. It is, said Boyle, “the green and pleasant land. It is something that still exists, and something that cries out to all of us like a childhood memory".

How ironic that in the same week as Boyle’s attempt at nostalgia was unveiled, a report was published showing that the food networks that support agriculture in this more traditional form are collapsing under pressure from the supermarkets and out-of-town development.

A report from the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), finds that "despite their critical importance to the health of our high streets, local economies and much loved landscapes, local food networks are under-recognised and poorly supported".

The report – from Field to Fork – shows that across England local food outlets serve an estimated 16.3 million customers a week and local food sales through independent outlets are worth  £2.7 billion a year to the economy, supporting over 100,000 jobs.

“They support diversity, distinctiveness and innovation in the food and farming sectors, broaden choice for shoppers, promote seasonality, reduce food miles and shape the character of towns and countryside".

But they are under continuous pressure and cracking under the strain. As supermarkets have expanded their share of the food market to 77% of the total, they have displaced food from the high street and the street market. Where smaller supermarkets are integrated into high streets, some diversity is maintained but where they move to giant out of town locations they destroy local food networks.

In spite of many pious promises to act on reports from retail experts, including the latest one from Mary Portas, out-of-town shopping developments are still increasing.

In 1980 there were fewer than 300 superstores and hypermarkets – by 2007 the number had soared to 1,500. And by late 2011, applications had been submitted or permission granted for a reported 44 million square feet of new supermarket development, equivalent to 572 football fields, 80% of it out of town.

Local councils occasionally attempt to deny planning permission, whereupon the supermarkets simply appeal to central government or pile on the pressure until agreement is given.

The result has been a collapse in traditional specialist food stores, such as butchers and greengrocers, from around 120,000 in the 1950s to 18,000 in the late 2000s. Town centre vacancy rates now average 14% and can be as high as 30%.

The reality in Britain is of farmers struggling to get a decent return for their produce from supermarket buyers who wield market power ruthlessly. And there is now a new drive to further industrialise farming in response to this (see my recent blog on this).

Whilst the supermarkets claim to create jobs, in 1998 the National Retail Planning Forum examined the effects on employment following the opening of 93 edge-of-town supermarkets and found a net average loss of 276 jobs in each area.


For shoppers there is no real price advantage at supermarkets. They all now promise to charge exactly the same as their competitors for most brands, and try to fool us that this is a benefit, not a cartel at work.

Boyle is right - the rural landscape is what most people cherish. But the corporates cherish only their bottom line. Their vision of England is a giant hypermarket fed by industrial farmers working to ferociously low profit margins, shoppers handing over all their cash in one location for goods with little health value and of dubious provenance, low paid workers with no fixed hours, called in to work at a moment's notice – and big fat profits all round!

That wouldn't make for a great Olympic spectacle and it is certainly not sustaining what is left of the “green and pleasant land”.

Penny Cole

Environment editor