A triumph of organisation; how did that happen?

What a thoroughly nice way to spend ~£10,000,000,000

One of the better legacies of London 2012 is the very obvious fact that the Great British Olympic Experience has been a stark contradiction of many of the features of British life that have charted our national decline in the past 50 years.

It's all over for another 4 years.

Firstly our lottery/celeb "get rich quick" ethos: with the exception of the opening and closing ceremonies, we barely saw or heard from a politician "on duty", and there was no easy political point scoring to be had from anything going on anyway. Once the medals started flowing, and the traffic stayed flowing, there was apparently no blame of any sort to apportion, and with no blame to hand out, most pygmy politicians are lost for a comment. Unless they happen to be French, of course.

Secondly, the games asserted that no one won anything by just getting lucky (other than the odd conniving aussie cyclist) or merely being famous; all the winners (including the famous ones) got there by relentless gruelling preparation. British success was founded on relentless selection, elitism, preparation and in most instances, sacrificial levels of family support. But for there to be winners, there must also be losers - the exact opposite of the dogmatic ideas of the past 50 years that have driven the disastrous British educational experiment. And so the race to try and spin attention away from that particularly inconvenient truth is well under way in the media of the social engineering classes. Does anyone dare say " Big Society", I wonder?

Darcey Bussell flies in on a rocket
powered phoenix; as you do...

GB won big in sitting-down events requiring huge preparation, complex technical support and costly facilities; a few of our ruffians beat-up a few of their ruffians; but it is again apparent that we need not bother in the mostly skill-free events that are selected from the global gene pool, unless we import the right genes.

The best show bit was when Freddie Mercury was briefly but very effectively resurrected - which reminded us what a lot of padding nonsense we had also been forced to watch - in much the same way that an indulgent feast of succulent rare fillet steak and chips is nutritionally engineered to seem somehow healthier with a couple of token veg, so the entertainment was socially engineered to be less purely an indulgence of Britain's rock and pop excellence, and more spiritually nutritious with a side portion of yoof cabbage rap and multicultural bangla broccoli.

Never forget that the opening and closing ceremonies were carrying the embers of the torch of the New Labour vision that steered the event design from 2005-2010 to embody a very New Labour vision of a random, confused, classless and mostly aimless multicultural Britain. Remember the Millennium Dome?

But you had better like this - or else be declared negative, beastly and reactionary. Possibly  even worse. People have already been arrested for not smiling sufficiently.

Olympian cock-ups: the gold medalists

We should have taken heed long ago and been warned by the defiant nature of the aggressive LOCOS defence of the appalling £400k logo, when so many obviously better (and free) designs were offered.

£400k's worth? We think not.

Here was an organisation that was absolutely convinced of its own immutable good judgement and sense and eager to brush off all criticism by hiding behind what must be one of the "ultimate deadlines" in world events - a deadline which left little scope for debate or discussion.

So there was none at virtually every step of the way. Sir Keith Mills (he of Nectar fame) has a fearsome "get it done" reputation, and Lord Coe's political instincts have imbued him with sufficient brass neck to brazen out just about any crisis of confidence. And the remit of the Olympics "at all costs" also leads LOCOS to imply that anyone daring to criticise anything they were up to was being unpatriotic and obstructive.

Anyone questioning LOCOS has been given short shrift, and so the first public fiasco - the ticketing challenge - was swept away in a  tide of "there was no other practical alternative". Oh yes there was.

The choice of the world's most reviled ticketing organisation to mind the reputation of the London Games was taken behind Locos' closed doors like so many other deadlined decisions of this event. The general response when questioned was that Tricketmaster is a large organisation and a safe pair of hands, so it was simply not possible to challenge that decision - or consider the alternative of working with a small local East London operation that lead the word in advanced ticketing technology. And thus the chance to develop a world beating London/British business that could be a shoo in for subsequent games and events like World Cups, was lost.

The current farago around security with G4S - another "safe pair of hands" choice that was beyond question or criticism - is simply astonishing. Anyone with any modicum of common sense would have guessed that G4S would try and recruit low cost staff from around the Olympic site - and following last summer's riots, it is not unfair to suggest that East London would not be a sensible recruiting ground.  

As it happens, the idea that security could now be in the hands of British armed forces is not unwelcome. And there is word that the Military will actually relish the opportunity to be involved and to display its versatility beyond posting its traditional statues around Wimbledon Court..

Maybe a long term idea would be to hand all of G4S public sector remits to the Army to fulfil using soon-to-be redundant personnel - but in a private new business established from the ground up to be "fit for purpose"..?