The Olympics Scam

East London waits with baited breath for the decision of the IOC on the site for the 2012 Olympics .. to find out whether we are all going to have to fork out the, at least, £200 in tax the government needs from us to pay for this gigantic waste of money. Londoners will pay £1.5 BILLION into an Olympic Lottery and at least £550 million in additional Council Tax!!

The East London Olympics will see the loss of hundreds of ordinary jobs in the area, large scale loss of open space and nature reserves, and sports facilities. Dozens of football pitches on East Marsh, Eton Manor Sports Ground, Eastway Cycle Circuit and Arena Fields Cricket will all go, at a time when sports facilities are being cut and shut as Haggerston knows only too well. And money from local sports projects will be diverted to the Olympics!

As always with scams like this it is being masked with vague promises of a sporting and housing ‘legacy’. But as with the Dome and Canary Wharf and previous Olympics, we will not see more jobs and homes for us and our kids but more jobs and flats for yuppies and increased housing costs for us – and sports facilities we paid for but cannot afford.

We say (and, unusually, the editor of the Economist magazine agrees with us!) that we should be spending the £2.5 BILLION needed to organise the Olympics, on getting people to PLAY sport – not on encouraging people to WATCH it.