The Olympic Legacy

And so following a very successful Olympics, which despite my usual disinterest I actually rather enjoyed, the political conversation has now shifted towards a nebulous concept – the Olympic legacy. Needless to say, politicians of all shades will be promoting this with the full knowledge that they are unlikely to be held to account for its delivery. This is all about perceptions, not substance and so words are cheap and will no doubt be plentiful on this topic. Nonetheless, the Olympics are likely to have a real impact on the political scene and so it will be worth speculating as to what this actual impact will be. As for it influencing how Scottish voters will vote in the referendum in 2013, or how the UK votes in the election presumably in 2015 there is only one appropriate response – It is the economy stupid!

The first thing of course has to be the ‘feel good’ factor. As mentioned in a previous post, all politicians of all shades try to jump onto major sporting events to try to get the electorate to feel better about them and the world in general. No doubt Cameron’s promise to maintain the existing level of sports funding for Olympic sport is doing exactly that. Milliband’s call for an all-party consensus is another example. However, it does appear that the coalition (and Labour) has very much appeared to have been left out with the media giving lots of print and air time to Boris Johnson. Politically, it very much appears that Johnson has benefitted, with negligible benefits for anyone else in politics although there is a possibility the whole class war thing may benefit some fringe political commentators. From a political perspective, this implies that the power and momentum behind the London Olympics has very much stayed within the London power base, national politics has been very much marginalised. Is this a possible indication of future political power shifts from national to local level? Or is London , as always, unique and so this cannot be seen to be representative of the nation as a whole?

One definitely positive message that came out of the Olympics was the sense of ‘civic spirit’ particularly surrounding the volunteers. Maybe Cameron can take some satisfaction that the Olympics has demonstrated better than anything else, what his concept of Big Society is all about. It will be very obvious that the Olympics was a success that involved minimal government intervention (the call up of the military and the huge amounts of cash pumped in notwithstanding!). However, Cameron will have to be very careful before he makes this claim. GB managed to pull in a record number of medals. But then everyone knows that this is in part because there has been a real push to properly fund Olympic success. While the volunteers and the athletics may have made the whole event really uplifting, it is clear that this spirit can only flourish where properly supported. Big Society as a concept has failed to prove that it is about harnessing and supporting this sort of spirit rather than being more about trying to make cuts and shift the burden onto volunteers or charities. The old adage, “you get what you put in” has very much run true of this Olympics and the Conservatives are going to struggle to get this message across. Simply put, the Conservative brand has not been detoxified and the Olympics may well make the electorate further associate cuts as causing long term damage. The whole argument around the sell-off of playing fields is a very poignant part of this narrative.

On a less positive note, the Olympics has seemed to have encouraged the media to give lots of print to a sort of ‘class war’ and focussing on the number of medals won by people from private schools. This debate is highly divisive and I fear leaving a sour after-note. The reasons for so many medals being won by privately educated people are relatively clear and easy to understand, any solutions for correcting this imbalance are not. As with anything in politics, whenever someone is peddling black and white ‘truths’ the reality is that they are expressing biases and opinions. Nothing is simple to solve even if the problem is easy to understand. It would be a pity for the Olympic legacy to descend into a destructive narrative about the ‘toffs’ winning the medals rather than the focus being on how to improve sports and sporting achievement in the UK in a way that is accessible to everyone. While the coalition may be rightly castigated for having a cabinet widely seen as elitist, this does not mean the Olympic medal holders should be seen within the context of this debate.

If people do not want to see the Eton and Oxbridge brigade dominating the top of government, rather than whinging about it and trying to arbitrarily restrict entry, focus the narrative on improving access from the bottom so than anyone of ability who works hard has a chance. This is true of education, of the Olympics and pretty much any other area of life. If you really want to damage or properly criticise the ‘millionaire’s cabinet’, nothing is more damaging than a credible discussion about their lack of competence. The USA and China ruthlessly focus on supporting competence and success rather than class in their politically polar opposite quest for Olympic glory. The legacy that the British nation has to take away from the Olympics is that it needs to do the same in its own British way. It does not need to be massively state controlled ( China ) or fully capitalist ( USA ) as the GB athletes and volunteers quite vividly demonstrated.