Our Olympics: A Case for Reclaiming London 2012

As athletes make their final preparations and construction of the Olympics’ venues continues apace, campaign group Our Olympics – alongside a rainbow coalition of activist groups – prepares to make London 2012 the greatest act of civil disobedience of our time.

The cost of the Games in London’s successful 2005 bid was £2.37bn. Today, it stands at £11bn in direct taxpayer contributions. According to Jules Boykoff, writing in the Guardian in April 2012, the figure has been reported as high as £24bn if enabling projects are taken into consideration. Given that we are being told our vital welfare and community services should be rationed and removed due to austerity, the extravagance of the London 2012 Olympics seems hypocritical to some and offensive to others.

The corporate sponsor list of this Olympics reads like a who’s-who of corporate mis-endeavour.  The Olympics branded ‘the greenest ever’ is being sponsored by BP, who recently settled a $7.8bn lawsuit following one of the biggest oil spills in history, and by Dow Chemicals who have refused to clean up the Bhopal disaster inherited from Union Carbide. An Olympics said to promote a healthy, active lifestyle has agreed a food and drinks branding monopoly with McDonald’s, Coca Cola and Cadbury. In fact, the world’s largest McDonald’s is being built in the Olympic Park. Meanwhile, the Paralympic Games is being sponsored by the multi-billion-euro IT and Healthcare conglomerate ATOS. A controversial choice of sponsor, given that this company instigated ‘work capability assessments’ which forced many ill and disabled people into work that they felt they were not fit for; that they felt might actually set back any recovery by pushing them too hard, too fast.

There is a vast security network set up around the games. Branding police scour the venues for home-made sandwiches and non-sponsor logos. The list of security hardware reads like an Orwellian tick-list for a dystopic state, including a warship in the Thames and missiles on the roofs of homes. National media and human rights’ organisations such as Liberty are increasingly reporting security clampdowns including pre-emptive Olympic ASBOs, which  ban people deemed a protest threat from going within 100m of Olympic sites. Anti-racist organisation Newham Monitoring Project has reported that teenagers in Stratford are facing curfews, dispersal orders and increased stop and search powers, essentially restricting their rights to be in public places in their own home town. A  great concern of campaign groups such as Our Olympics is that these regressive changes in legislation and security architecture will become the real legacy of London 2012.

Finally, there is the context in which the Games operates. Austerity is being used as means of diverting public funds from public services to private interests. This government has accelerated the selling off of national assets, only to lease them back at a higher rate from private corporations. The Health and Social Care Bill seeks to privatise the NHS by stealth, opening the door to private healthcare providers to use up to 49% of NHS beds. Already a private healthcare conglomerate, ‘Circle’  is running Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire. The Welfare Reform Bill introduced myriad cost-cutting reforms hitting the disabled, the unemployed and the mentally ill. Then there is the Workfare programme which requires people to work a 35 hour week, often for a multinational corporation, in order to continue receiving ‘unemployment’ benefit. A day’s pay for a day’s work? Not in this day and age. And as schools become academies, or limited companies independent of the Local Education Authority, their budgets are diverted to costly repayments of Private Finance Initiative agreements which fund flashy new buildings with ridiculously high operating costs, whilst teachers’ pensions and conditions are eroded.

For its use of public funds to generate a corporate feeding frenzy, its total disregard for the environment and local communities, its focus on big business to the exclusion of anything else and for its assaults on civil liberties – for all these reasons, London 2012 is the epitome of everything that those involved in the Our Olympics campaign want to stand against. The Corporate Games, this ostentatious salute to neoliberalism, requires an equally vibrant, loud, un-ignorable response from those with a commitment to social, economic and environmental justice.

On 28 July 2012, with a Mass Day of Action, Our Olympics intends to make a stand and to highlight the inequities and injustice embedded in these ‘games’. 28 July will not be the first or last day of protest but it is the one we hope a very large number of people will participate in. This is our chance to become a human megaphone for voiceless and marginalised groups in the UK and across the world. This is our chance to make a stand for what we believe in: a world where people are valued as equals, where contribution is enabled and recognised and the planet is respected and nurtured. Join us.

Find OurOlympics online at www.ourolympics.org or on Twitter: @ourolympics

By Kerry-Anne Mendoza (@ScriptoniteDaily)