London's Olympic Folly - II

Just as I've been predicting for quite a while now, London's successful bid for the 2012 Olympics is turning out to be a financial black hole which only grows the more funds are shovelled into the stupid enterprise.

The cost of the 2012 London Olympics could rise to nearly four times the figure set out in the city's bid for the Games, the BBC has learned.

The Treasury and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) are discussing a price of £9bn - up from an initial figure of £2.35bn.

Construction alone could cost £3.3bn, the government has said.

Anybody who didn't see this coming is a fool, and all of the nationalistic fools who cheered at learning of London's "victory" in gaining this white elephant are now going to have to live with the consequences to their pocketbooks; my one regret is that I'm forced to share in the burden of paying for this ridiculous extravaganza. The Olympic Games are invariably an exercise in folly, notwithstanding the ridiculous rationalizations trotted out for hosting them: if the usual "urban regeneration" apologia held out for the games is worth anything, then surely it will be worthwhile to do without hosting the Olympics, and it ought to be cheaper to do so as well.

PS: Via Stephen Pollard comes a brilliant suggestion for fixing this mess - why not just pull out of hosting the 2012 Olympics, even if it means paying the IOC an indemnity? No feasible indemnity could cost anything like as much as this poisoned chalice will cost British taxpayers if borne till 2012, so the suggestion makes perfect economic sense, although I see no British politician with the guts or vision to pursue such a course of action.

Comments

[Ross]

Well I've already expressed my shock and amazement at this turn of events in the Stephen Pollard entry you link to so I won't repeat myself.

The urban regeneration argument for the olympics would be funny if it weren't so devastating to the local economy when politicians take it seriously. Real business are being forcibly evicted from the site where the olympic venues will be built in order to be replaced by athletics stadiums, velodromes, handball courts and aquatic centres that will be used a couple of dozen times a year at best and even then seldom at anything close to capacity.

The government announced a super casino would be built in Manchester to spur urban regeneration, ironically it is being built next to Manchester City's stadium which was built for the Commonwealth games in order to .... spur urban regeneration! I guess east London can look forward to some casinos being built sometime around 2014.

[Abiola]

"Real business are being forcibly evicted from the site where the olympic venues will be built in order to be replaced by athletics stadiums, velodromes, handball courts and aquatic centres that will be used a couple of dozen times a year at best and even then seldom at anything close to capacity."

As the Ryugyong has taught us, there's nothing like huge, slowly decaying buildings in an inhuman scale to give their surroundings that special regenerated feeling ...

The more one examines the circular "logic" deployed to justify such public follies, the less sense one can make of it all. The craziest thing of all is that the Blair government had *already* been burnt once by its support for a similarly ill-conceived scheme in the form of the Millenium Dome, and yet it insisted on rolling the dice yet again on a much larger scale. Couple Blair's immunity to learning from experience with Comrade Ken as mayor and we have the makings of a financial disaster for the ages.

[Ross]

{ Blair government had *already* been burnt once }

Actually you're being too generous, they've had their finger burnt on at least 5 occasions, the Dome, new Wembley, the Scottish Parliament building, Picketts Lock and the Royal Opera House. You never know, this time it might be different!