1410 Hrs GMT
London
Sunday
25 July 2010:
Editor © Muhammad Haque.
The London ECONOMIST is as crass as the agenda it peddles and promotes. The role playerd in the creation of peoverty by that tool of Big Business that loots the rest of the economic will not be found in its pages. Nor will the facts be found in the so-called rival outlets. We put on the record the latest incident of the ECONOMIST promoting poverty-creation in London and at the expense of the people of and in East London in the context of or continuing examination of the evidence of HOW successive regimes in the UK keep poverty-creation going.
Here [below] is what the ‘ECONOMIST’ web site carries today [Sunday 25 July 2010]
Our detailed examination of the contents of the paragraph referring to ‘poor people’ will appear on this and other Khoodeelaar! And associated web sites and blogs ion the next few hours.
[To be continued]
“London's Olympics
Field of dreams
Two years before the Olympics, Britain is doing well. But it’s what happens after the games that matters
Jul 22nd 2010
FIVE years ago this month London won the right to stage the summer Olympic games in 2012. This newspaper did not share in the general rejoicing. We had argued that the games would be a waste of money and a great inconvenience to our home city. We haven’t changed our minds. We still wish that the whole circus had gone to Paris.
But we are where we are. London’s games are a mere two years away. The main stage for them is taking impressive and unstoppable shape on a tract of once deindustrialised, contaminated land in the east of the city (see article and article). What matters now is that London makes the best of its folly—and beats the sorry standards set by past wastrel hosts of the sporting jamboree. Besides staging games that are exciting and safe, three criteria will determine how well it does.
The first of these is money. Here London made a shameful start. In 2003 Britons were told that the games would cost about £3 billion ($4.9 billion), plus £1 billion to spruce up the grubby corner of their capital where the games would be staged. By 2007, when the sums were redone, the cost of getting ready had been bumped up to £9.3 billion. Part of the extra was for security, for which blame the suicide-bombers who struck the day after the city won the games. But most was for increased building costs, a lack of private-sector enthusiasm (and money), tax and a “contingency”—of £2.7 billion, if you please—to make the new budget unbustable.
Related items
* The 2012 Olympics: The greatest sideshow on EarthJul 22nd 2010
* Olympic legacies: Show's overJul 22nd 2010
Since then, though, the builders have done a fine job. They have kept to the bloated budget and might even hand something back to the Treasury. On this score, London looks much better than Athens, which overspent by a factor of far more than two—and the great record-breaker, Montreal, whose citizens were paying for the 1976 games for decades.
The second criterion is time. Many big projects struggle to get to the finishing line. Athens (again) had a severe bout of the jitters. FIFA, football’s global ruler, funnelled more cash into South Africa before this year’s World Cup to make sure that the stadiums were built before kick-off. London, though, is comfortably on course. Visitors from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), in town this month, purred at its progress.
Keeping to time and budget, however, is the least Britons can expect. The third criterion is the most important: making good use of what’s left when the athletes, the IOC bigwigs and the world’s media go home. Lots of cities have failed this miserably. Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, the wonder of the world in 2008, is underused, goggled at by day-trippers and the odd concert-goer. Several sites in Athens (sorry to keep on, but you left us no choice) are empty and rotting. Some cities have done better. Barcelona’s Olympics in 1992 were a welcome element of a wider regeneration. Sydney, host in 2000, didn’t have much of a plan when its games ended but has made a success of its Olympic quarter, built like London’s on deindustrialised land.
The final lap
From the outset, the London Olympics has at least had a declared aim: the regeneration of the city’s poor eastern districts. Better still, London at least has started thinking about what it will do with its Olympic Park to help bring this about. In the coming months, the state-owned company that will take the park over after the games is expected to set out its plans.
Its task is to create a place where people will want to live, work and play in a part of town that people have been eager to escape, where jobs have been hard to come by and where welcoming, wide, green spaces are too rare. There are hopeful precedents in the new towns built after the second world war, the garden cities of a century ago and in the private estates built in west London in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There are voices calling for much more social housing in the Olympic Park. It is true that London is short of homes for poor people. But concentrated social housing goes hand in hand with joblessness and enduring poverty: too much of the first will condemn the area to too much of the second and third. To imitate the success of the new towns and garden cities, and to generate jobs and encourage prosperity, the park will need a mix of homes as well as a good swathe of greenery. Get this right, and the games might almost be worthwhile.”
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