June 2011 – Aerial photo of the Olympic Park media centre. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
200 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is an excellent article from Spiegel, on Stratford, East London, and host to the Olympics. It’s well worth a read. Check it out!
London Olympics puts focus on gentrification of Stratford – SPIEGEL ONLINE.
In a few days, the Olympics will start with celebrations, and the whole World will be watching the games. However, afterwards, there will probably be many years of argument, related to overspending of budgets, favoritism and the long term economic benefits. It would be good for the Treasury to publish the economic benefit assessment, with the assumptions.
What do you think?
Related articles
- The Olympian Stakes for East London (rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com)
- Rehearsal gives glimpse of the Games: chaos on trains (independent.co.uk)
- London 2012 Olympics: Sorry side of Stratford Games chiefs don’t want you to see (dailymail.co.uk)
Dr Alf's Blog 
Spiegel Online have been very polite.
The Olympic Games will have cost a total of £20 billion gbp to date and we have still to see detailed accounts.
The original estimate for costs was £2.9 billion gbp and the business case for the “Olympic Legacy” was made seven years ago in 2005 before the recession.
Part of that legacy was to provide business and contract opportunities for local people. It did not because most of the people who built the stadium were Polish and almost all the construction work was handed to multinationals and the usual suspects.
The economic case for the games is in my view bogus and unproven but I will change my mind as when and if I see a detailed and forensic review of all the figures with a guarantee from someone of stature that there is just ONE set of books and all the money has been accounted for. This did not happen with the Millenium Dome and I suspect it will happen here.
We are told that “All the eyes of the World will be on us” as if this gave us a great showcase to show our prowess and that “Britain is open for business”.
People look at our tax regime, our infrastructure and the skills of our workforce relative to those of other countries and make unfavourable comparisons with other countries thus ensuring investments go elsewhere.
They also look at our inability to get the right number of security guards, the problems at our airports, the lack of a coherent strategy for airport capacity and interaction with emerging markets and they listen to the defeatist Cameron promising 8 more years of austerity with no plan for growth–All really inspirational stuff designed to make a foreign investor’s blood race and provide inspiration to the people!
Already Germany is about to overtake us in the inward investment stakes and they did not win the Olympic Games.
Looking more closely at the Olympic Village, we discover that it’s Arab owner is not going to sell anything or create new development for at least 2 years because as he said in the Daily Telegraph, the conditions are not right economically.
Already we are seeing economic DIS-BENEFIT as theatres, restaurants and traditional venues that benefit from tourism are seeing less of it.
Taxi drivers have for the most part decided to go on holiday during the Olympics and so have millions of others, so the benefits that people said were coming here will go elsewhere.
If we win lots of gold medals and everything passes off without a major hitch or terrorist attack this might make a difference but from where I sit the Olympics has put a lot of money into a few people’s pockets and the BBC’s, but is actually delivering a lot of hype and hot air rather than any true economic benefit to the people of the East End or to the rest of us.