Olympic Gold for Rachmanism?

In response to criticism of the heavy handed, bullying way “Lord” Seb Coe’s Olympic project is hounding lifelong London residents out of their homes to make way for The Great White Elephant Of The Self Aggrandising Elite, the ignoble Lord has rebutted suggestions that his team are misbehaving and telling porkies.
“It bis ludicrous tyo claim the Olympics will lead to displacement and poverty,” he whined.
Well of course it is. As most of the people to be evicted are old, vulnerable and/or economically disadvantaged they are already victims of poverty.
Their evictions will therefore lead to homelessness, despair and suicide.

MORE ON THE OLYMPICS AND THE “BENEFITS” IT IS BRINGING TO LONDON TOMORROW.

We Told You So #1,565,307

We hate to say we told you so, (no we don’t, we love it) but here we go for the squillionth time.
Latest estimates for the final cost of the Olympic Spendfest have trebled the original budget. Financial catastrophe was entirely predictable of course, all such projects undertaken in Bureaucratic Britain fall victim to the modern equivalent of medieval plagues. So where the builders of most of the west end had to contend with Typhoid, Cholera, Black Death, Smallpox, and acute encephalitis of the knees.
The Olympic project however will increasingly become bogged down by the following:

a plague of spin,
ditto consultants,
spreadsheets,
meetings,
middlemen,
special interest groups,
political chicanery,
private finance initiatives.

so fellow taxpayers, we can expect to be digging a lot deeper into our pockets before we see a stadium start to take shape.

Failing Before You’ve Started.

The Machiavelli Blog has a track record of chronicling the monumental incompetence of Blair’s government but the emerging saga of the 2012 Olympics has left us gobsmacked.
Not a brick has been laid, no erection has been erected, not even a single cubic yard of concrete has been poured (but they do have a nice legoland model) and yet already the project is running behind schedule and over budget.
The fact is the project management committee are wasting time and spending fortunes on consultancy fees, not to mention decimating the world’s pine forests and doing a big favour for the paper making industry, as they struggle to define the scope of their project and exactly who pays for what.
Is the whole thing the responsibility of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport? should Ken Livingstone’s London Authority pick up the £2billion tab for “regeneration work in the Lower Lea Valley, (taking all the shit and detritus of a thousand years of London life away, in plain English.) And who will foot the bill for security estimates of which are rising exponentially as the war on terror moves to our doorstep.
One may be forgiven of course for thinking the Government ought to have thought of all this before they put our bid in. But planning ahead is the job of proper consultants, not the kind of tax – eaters Governments employ.
Current favourite sources for covering the shortfall are the National Lottery’s Heritage and Culture funds.
So as usual we find the future is being landed with the bill for Blair’s legacy. What might that legacy be? you might well ask.
A seriously fucked up nation with no pride, an ersatz culture and a collective attitude problem that’s what.
Seems to me whatever happens, the future gets a lousy deal