Sponsored by
Rod McPhee: Not ringing true
CARRYING THE TORCH: Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games.
Well, just six months to go before the London Olympics and, like a lot of you out there, I couldn’t give a monkey’s.
This has been sold to us as some kind of national event. It isn’t. For those of us outside the capital it doesn’t just feel semi-detached but far, far removed.
And we keep being told in Leeds, as in other UK cities and regions, that we’re all effectively playing host, but how? How are people in this city really participating in the Olympics, other than in a very token or ephemeral way?
Yes, we’ll be hosting the Chinese athletes but doesn’t that just mean we’re effectively going to be a commuter town? Somewhere they’ll sleep and train, before heading south. Just how will that practically benefit anyone living in this city? What tangible benefits? What improvement to the lives of your average Loiner?
True, we’ll all feel rather excited and terribly inspired come the summer, but, prior to that, and immediately after that, there won’t be much else to look forward to. It feels like we’re being told about a really great party at someone else’s house – we aren’t invited, but we should somehow be exhilarated by the fact that their house is close to ours.
And all the time we watch as millions of our pounds are poured into regenerating a rather down-at-heel section of London. You can’t begrudge the locals that money. But, equally, you can’t expect us to get terribly excited at the prospect.
Part of the problem is that the capital still exists largely within a bubble. We aren’t part of a network of cities. We’re arterial, not really at the heart of things. We feed the south and not much else flows north.
I’m the first to applaud any kind of investment, or some optimistic move, some visionary thinking. And if I had the choice of having the Olympics abroad or in London, I’d choose the latter.
Nevertheless, there’s no way of nailing down exactly what good the games will do for Britain beyond the M25. Local tourism chiefs produce a statistic here, a civic leader delivers a motivational speech there, but no one can offer definitive proof of what, for our national investment, the provinces will get back.
Maybe I’ll be proved wrong. Maybe in the coming months there will be some great revelation which justifies the claim that we, as a city, as a country, are not only hosting these Olympics but benefiting from these Olympics.
If the revelation never comes, and once the games are over, then would be the chance to start asking our government what they intend to do for the 53m Britons who don’t live in London.
Email to a friend
Print this page- Politics: Mark Hookham's Westminster blog - 5.33pm
- Castleford RSPB Fairburn Ings: High wire act Swallows’ summer parade
- Worker dies on North Yorkshire Moors Railway
- Video: Restaurant reopens on Leeds Harry Ramsden’s site after £500,000 refit
- Chocolat author will tempt guests at Leeds Big Bookend Festival
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 26 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: East
Your view
Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.