KHOODEELAAR! Updating the evidence of the multiple stupidities of the CRASSrail-peddling London EVENING STANDARD..

By © Muhammad Haque
1038 [1000] Hrs GMT
London Saturday 7 February 2009

KHOODEELAAR! Updating the evidence of the multiple stupidities of the CRASSrail-peddling London EVENING STANDARD..

Question: What has the ‘newspaper’ done wrong?
What is the ‘Standard’ doing wrong?

Answer: It has now published a piece about the 2012 Olympic Games Hosting costs. But the piece is not by an economics or a finance correspondent or writer. Nor is it by any of its apparently political ones either. It is by one of its listed ‘columnists’. With the sole exception of Andrew Gilligan, who is also listed, the ‘columnists’ who currently appear most often, lack the necessary substance to be treated seriously. And one of the least credible ones, David Sexton, is now given space by the ‘‘the London EVENING nostandards STANDARD” to opine on the exorbitant, almost runaway costs of the 2012 Games hosting irresponsibility…

On all key aspects of the matter of the Crassrail and the 2012 Olympic Games Hosting misadventures, the London EVENING nostandards STANDARD has misled the people of London.

And it has carried contradictory items.

The London EVENING nostandards STANDARD has suppressed the evidence that would have saved a lot of waste. And it has denied space to evidence that would have changed the circumstances in the lives of many people and would have in fact improved the quality and the standard of life for millions of people…

The same ‘editorial’ policy has been pursued by the DAILY MAIL. The owners of the DAILY MAIL have owned the London EVENING nostandards STANDARD until the last week.

The least credible ‘columnists’ David Sexton is also one of the worst ‘observers’ of society. And nowhere is more relevant in this context than the ‘East End of London’.

Sexton was allowed to publish in 2006 one of the most corrupt and untruthful ‘opinion’ pieces that has ever been published even by the dishonestly and the racistly-edited London EVENING nostandards STANDARD.

As the ‘stadium’ for the 2012 Games Hosting is sited in a spot that is just outside the boundaries of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and inside the adjacent borough of Newham, Khoodeelaar! will look at the David Sexton piece about the costs of the 2012 Games Hosting, in some detail.

In the course of that, we shall also examine the licensed role as the resident racist and crusader that Sexton has been playing.

And we shall ask: Has Anne McElvoy, who has been the ‘executive editor’ at the ‘newspaper’ and who recently claimed [incredibly and embarrassingly ignorantly] that SHE had worked our, as far back as 2004, that Barack Obama was the [‘next’] ‘Black Kennedy’ [!!!!!!!!!!] - noticed the insidious, the pernicious the poisonous ignorance and prejudice spouted by David Sexton? Does Sexton owe apologies to so many people whose humanity, whose faiths, whose beliefs he has violated for no reason other than the fact that Sexton is a brainwashed zombie who is given the licence to say things against people who he is also given to believe are NOT ALLOWED A RIGHT TO ANSWER BACK TO RACIST AND XENOPHOBIC attacks carried against them by and in the London EVENING nostandards STANDARD…

[To be continued]




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Let’s call time on London 2012 - a hop, skip and jump jamboree
David Sexton
06.02.09
There's no limit to what we can do when we really try. We put a man on the Moon. We discovered how to transplant hearts. We have decoded the genome. So let us not have any question about it: we could, if we wanted, still cancel the 2012 Olympics. The announcement this week that the cost of the main stadium alone has soared by another £43 million to £547 million has to be the last straw.

This is not a joke or a rhetorical flourish. The planned opening ceremony is still more than three years away. We do not need to accept this vast imposition as a fait accompli.

The event could, at this juncture, be relocated in one of the other cities that have already held the Olympics recently. And where they are broadcast from is a matter of complete indifference to any Londoner I've ever met, even among the minority who actually get something out of the old hop, skip and jump.

As for the zones in Stratford and elsewhere, construction should be halted at once while costings are made for converting the sites into houses and hospitals instead. There may well be a Keynesian argument for supporting major works with public money but they need to be better planned than these single-use stadiums. Unless stopped, the Olympics will leave a “legacy” of structures to be converted afterwards. Do it now.

None of the arguments put forward by the hapless Tessa Jowell make sense. The 2012 Olympics will not inspire young people to take up sport themselves and become more fit and healthy. That can only be done at ground level, not by building a daft “velodrome” at a cost of £105 million.

And we were, of course, deliberately duped about these Olympics all the way. The original estimate used to launch the bid of £2.4 billion was just a con-trick, as Ken Livingstone admitted last year. By the time of the actual bid in 2005, the figure had risen to £4.1 billion, a sum the Public Accounts Committee subsequently dismissed as “entirely unrealistic”.

In March 2007, Jowell announced a revised figure of £9.345 billion and the Games chiefs still insist they will remain within this budget. But a former Chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, Jack Lemley, has admitted that they had long been working with an estimate of £12 billion and the real figure might be £20 billion. We do know the figures will only go one way: up.

One result of the crash is that we all have begun to take these vast figures of public debt more seriously. Where before they seemed just too big to have any personal consequences for us, we have begun fearfully to realise we and our children must pay every penny. We may have been tricked into the 2012 Olympics but this is one nightmare we can still change. Can't we?

What I suggest may sound unthinkable. But what's really unthinkable is to continue with this ever more costly monstrosity.

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