• Fuck_the_London_2012_Olimpdicks

• Fuck the London 2012 Olimpdicks

• It’s over rated, will be over priced and is already way, way over budget. It’s currently cutting a swathe through a large section of east London and is soon to be shitting on the doorsteps of many non-fans of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

• East London is already bearing the brunt of rampant redevelopment amidst ridiculous and ever-escalating property prices but, in typical historical fashion of putting the Eastenders bottom of the pile, they now have another factor to contend with. The International Olympic Committee along with the London Development Agency and aided by sporty twats like Tory MP Sebastian Coe are struggling to stay in control of what is a pretty ham-fisted and dim-witted attempt to host the Games. They have asserted that the Games will be nothing but ‘a boost to the local economy’ and that we will all have a range of wonderful sporting venues to ‘use’ post-Games; this is all funded by what seems to be an endless amount taxpayers and Lottery money.
• They have done a bang-up job of convincing the majority of the public that the two-week sporting event itself could only mean a positive social, economic and environmental impact on east London. As a result, anyone raising concerns are likely to be written off as opposing ‘much needed regeneration of a socially deprived area’. This has been a very effective strategy in closing down public debate about the implications of hosting the Olympics and the misleading claims of the its supporters.
• Cast your mind back to the last similar venture – the Millennium Dome. This was billed as a strong asset to Londoners and something which would have a lasting legacy after the seconds-hand blipped past midnight one particular New Years Eve. Back in reality and the Dome has been largely unused and most definitely unloved. Only recently was redeveloped into a super-club entertainment village.
• £340 million was siphoned off from sports lottery distributors just to promote the London bid. Since they won the bid the costs have mounted and the public can do bugger all about it. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport admit that £64 million per annum of lottery funding will be diverted to the Olympic developments between 2005 and 2012. Council tax payers will have to cough up around £20 per year for the next 25 years – a total of £500 per head. The latest serious estimates from The Treasury are around £9billion, a far cry from an initial figure of ‘just’ £2.35bn.
• The monetary farce won’t stop there for those fickle enough to be itching to see the Games in person. High ticket prices will make spectating beyond the pockets of most Londoners. As we are losing a large area of green land (and dilapidated buildings just ripe for partying!) we should be getting complimentary tickets all round, though I suspect this will not be the case. What is already part travesty, part tragedy has actually turned out to be the one thing which has truly ruffled my feathers. There’s plenty of injustice in the world which gets me frothing at the mouth, but as a lifetime resident of Waltham Forest, Hackney and Newham I’m fucking furious that I am forced to watch the marshes get paved over to make way for car parks and an area rich in industrial history cleared to make way for stadiums and gymnasiums which will most probably be uninhabited shells within a few years post-Games.
• The Lower Lea Valley has been designated as a Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation by GLA’s Ecology Unit. It is this same area which is making way for the vainglorious Olympics. The Hackney, Walthamstow and Leyton Marshes are former Lammas Lands. This means they are meadows upon which parishioners had the common right to graze cattle from Lammas Day (the Celtic Midsummer Day, August 1) until Lady Day (old New Year’s Day, March 25). These rights date back to before the Norman Conquest, and possibly pre-date the Roman era. In June 1894, the new Parish of Hackney Marsh was established, and the marshes were given to the people of Hackney in perpetuity for recreational use as open space. Grampian conditions attached to the Olympic planning applications state that the developing agency must provide exchange land for Common Land and open space taken up by Olympic developments, a procedure required under the 1981 Acquisition of Land Act. However, the New Lammas Lands Defence Committee were told by Hackney Council at the end of 2005 that planners were defaulting on this obligation. Since then, a clause has been inserted in the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Bill to remove this imperative.
• East London faces the break up of the largest concentration of amateur football pitches in Europe, relocation of a local cycle track, running and walking routes. There will be displacement of other uses, including three Travellers’ settlements, artists’ studios, and what was formerly Clays Lane Housing Co-operative, once the largest housing co-op in Europe. Despite having their homes put under a Compulsory Purchase Order, many still haven’t been offered any replacement accommodation.
• Travellers from the Clays Lane site have been informed of only one site for relocation near a giant sewage works, a gas works, and perilously close to the Thames. Their second ‘choice’ is a car park under a flyover, a destination typical of the apartheid of Traveller settlements in the past.
• Over 400 students of the University of East London, also based at Clays Lane, were evicted by the University in advance of the bid decision in July 2005. Then there is also the relocation of small businesses from the Lower Lea Valley. The lack of land compensation payments will impact on staff, leading to wage stringencies or redundancies. Increased distances for delivery vehicles and trucks owned by relocated companies are a disaster for the ‘sustainable’ ambitions of the Olympic proposals (although presumably not counted by official monitors).
• Further non-economic costs such as traffic congestion, vandalism, environmental degradation, disruption of residents’ lifestyle, and so on are also rarely reported. As for new homes, the creation of 4000 affordable homes has to be balanced against the impact on tenants in east London. In 2000, Sydney saw rents increase and greedy landlords evict tenants in the lead up to the Olympics. With Newham being one of the cheapest places to buy property in London this is just as likely to happen again.
• Stratford, the main area of London being overhauled, doesn’t need the Olympics for regeneration as there are already new blocks of flats, a Porsche showroom and shiny offices opening everywhere. It is the Olympics which need Stratford for its excellent transport connections, open space and its marginal communities and businesses which are easier to move. It was also chosen to meet the requirements of the International Olympic Committee which specifies the need for an integrated park. The IOC demand that athletes should be accommodated in a Village and not be required to walk for more than twenty minutes. If this means businesses and residents, who may have been there for decades, be moved so that athletes shouldn’t be inconvenienced for a couple of weeks, so be it. In Beijing it is now thought around 1.4 million have been forcibly moved, some illegally. In Seoul the figure was around 700,000.
• In every Olympic host city there has been, with varying levels of severity, some sort of forced removal of the poor. For the 1936 Games in Nazi Berlin, Roma were sent to the Marzhan concentration camp at the edge of the city. In Los Angeles, for the 1984 Games, homeless people were driven out of the city boundaries. In Atlanta, in 1996, construction of the Centennial Park (a commercial open space dominated by Olympic sponsors) displaced around 1,000 homeless people and four shelters set up to help them. Roma settlements were also displaced for the Athens 2004 Olympics. In British Colombia indigenous peoples are facing disruptive planning applications associated with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
• The British government and London Mayor’s office are lining up the Olympics as a supposed boost to much needed regeneration, but there are also other projects riding off the back of hosting the Games. These include the Crossrail cross-town train line, Stratford International – a new station linked to the Eurostar, and Stratford City (which echoes of New Detroit in Robocop). There are also new runways planned at London’s airports which BAA, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic (some of the major sponsors of the Games) are pushing as necessary to be built to cope with the influx of extra visitors.
• If you need further proof of the damaging effects of staging the Games you can look to Barcelona who held the Olympics in 1992 and the parallels with that city are pretty shocking. The city council used it as an excuse to tear down various parts of the city to build the stadiums and the Olympic Village. It created a small rush of temporary jobs, lead to actual decline in permanent jobs in the area and as with all of the Games only a handful of large corporations stood to profit from it. It is in fact the Olympic Committee, and not the city, who collects the profit from television broadcasting rights.
• In the run up to the Games the property prices in Barcelona increased significantly over the rest of Spain. During the Games tourism declined in the region around Barcelona. After the Games ditched town there was no sign of a positive impact on the economy and many of the features constructed for the Games are simply expensive tourist traps. They then tried to repeat the ‘success’ of hosting a pivotal mega-event in 2004 with the Barcelona Forum. Rather than reuse the venues built for the Olympics they built a new one – which haunts the previously low-rent seafront area it was built in.
• However, if we consider that the investors that promoted and financed a big part of the Olympic Games budget in Barcelona were real estate and construction companies, property developers, land speculators, finance companies and hotel and catering trade firms you could conclude that the 1992 Barcelona Olympics were indeed a success.
• The local economy doesn’t stand to gain from having the Olympics in London. Much of the money spent by out-of-town visitors goes towards hotel rooms, rental cars, and restaurants. These are usually national or multi-national companies. Ticket sales are often paid to the league or the sport’s ruling body instead of local organisers.

• The increasing commercialisation of the Olympic Movement means London Olympics will primarily be a fortnight long, closely protected advertising opportunity. There is worse news for anti-corporate campaigners disgusted by the prospect of McDonalds and Coca Cola sponsoring the Olympics as there are rules against any form of demonstration. Laws protecting commons and metropolitan spaces have been swept aside but a new law gives draconian penalties for any business even referring to the 2012 Olympics unless it is an official sponsor. London 2012 will be the most soulless and corporate-led games yet.

• There are even more sinister aspects to the Games. Inevitably the public will foot the bill whilst corporations and property developers will rake in bumper profits, all under the approving auspices of the IOC. Early in 2004, IOC vice-president Kim Un-Yong was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail on corruption charges. Thirteen members of the IOC were expelled in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics bid after investigations into bribe taking.
• 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 UK over the last few decades. There are plans to make wider use of the British police’s DNA database to identify suspects through their relatives. 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 Games are not fun-and-games for anyone but the ruling elite. The people of East London lose out on open space, existing facilities, affordable housing and business premises. What is already hard to grab will be made out of reach. Even after the dust has settled over the Games no one but top athletes and those lucky enough to be able to nab a place to live in the new Stratford developments will stand to win in this, the latest chapter in the saga of senseless urban renewal forced upon us.
• Most of this article was pinched from various sources. Thanks to the original authors

The best site to keep an eye on the Games is: www.gamesmonitor.org