ninme

The Sunday Times - Final word
Now for the dance of the H&S inspectors

China set the tone for this year’s Olympics with its breathtaking opening ceremony on Friday and, in the process, created a problem for the London 2012 team. Barely had the final firework spluttered before British officials were studying their wallets gloomily and playing down expectations. So, as Dame Jade Goody and Sir Jonathan Ross guide viewers through the 2012 ceremony, what will be unfolding in front of them? How can we show the traditions and authentic face of modern Britain? China can keep its kung-fu performers. We will surprise the world with an imaginative display of dancing health and safety inspectors, their yellow reflective jackets glittering in the spotlights. The stage will then clear to reveal an Islamic dance troupe, fully veiled, who will take us through the highlights of our history, apologising after each incident to any nations we might have inadvertently offended. The proceedings will end with a lavish and ceremonial display of binge drinking. And if the caretaker comes in halfway through to lock up because orders is orders - then all the better.

Oh lord.

But what about the closing ceremonies? Has London sent an advance team of crack H&S Inspectors to do some cartwheels around the birds nest or haven’t they thought about that at all. Gordon Brown will be there, at least. Maybe he can do a song and a dance.

Update:

The Sunday Times - I spy a little Olympic crack in China’s wall, by Simon Jenkins

When China won the contract to host the Olympics, the official Xinhua press agency declared it “another milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation”. Nobody watching Friday’s start to $40 billion of public expenditure, in what is still one of the world’s poorest nations, could be in any doubt of that. Let us hear no more about the Olympics being about sport.

Ever since their refounding at the end of the 19th century the Olympics have been about politics, whether they were Hitler’s chauvinist parade of 1936 or the current International Olympic Committee’s wishy-washy vacuities about harmony and peace. It is not swimming, running and jumping that have brought 80 world leaders to Beijing. It is national pride. Not since 1936 have the Games been so overtly political as now. …

Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell, the Games minister, keep hyping the British Games as “making a profit”. They never give figures. The only profit is to a tiny circle of architects, consultants and construction companies. An Olympic Games must be the most expensive public gesture, in billions of dollars a day, that any nation can undertake in peacetime, a political spectacular masquerading as sport.

The IOC was drawn to China as the one big country to which it still had a quid pro quo to offer: international respectability. The IOC knew that China might be induced to spend huge sums, not by virtue of political reform, but to cloak the absence of such reform.

To China the deal seemed a good one. The last great dictatorship on Earth must have regarded paying for the Games as a cheap admission fee compared with taking a gamble on free speech, regional devolution, the rule of law and contested elections.

So far the deal has held. Beijing has delivered the IOC the requisite extravaganza. Its sportsmen and women, many barely out of childhood, have risen to the occasion, supplying countless smiling faces to bedeck the IOC’s mission statement of joy and the brotherhood of mankind.

The IOC seems to have found in Chinese communism a shared language and nostalgia for the drilled utopianism of the mid-20th century. A large area of old Beijing has been razed and rebuilt with stadiums, office blocks and avenues, monuments to the modernising zeal of the party. Morally emasculated western architects have lined up for work, led by the son of Albert Speer as master planner.

So, if you have no national pride, what do you spend the 40 billion dollars on?