Greecian Revenge

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 15 March 2007 13:55:32

For those who may have sniggered behind their newspapers at Athens' difficulties in getting ready for the '04 Olympics, it looks like the joke is on you. London's 2012 Olympics look like being an over expensive disaster in the making.

All the financial claims made in the bid to the IOC look like proving false. The government today announced a revised budget of £9.35bn ($19bn). Originally they'd forgotten about things like VAT on building etc. Even though they had one of the big 4 accountancy firms and civil servants advising them. Now we find that the budget has trebled in 12 months.

We're told that the government will raid the UK lottery's Good Causes fund to the tune of at least £600m ($1.2bn). The arts have already had a high proportion of their funding removed to pay for it. Where are charities and development groups going to get their additional fnding from?

London's taxpayers are already hit by a levy on their council tax. Their mayor, "Red" Ken Livingstone, has also promised an additional £300m ($580m) in additional support but has not said where the money will come from. Only that it won't be council tax or transport. Maybe it'll be from the money he's saved by buying London's fuel from Hugo Chavez in Venezuala.

Many feared that the Olympics would turn into another Millenium Dome. We were assured that this wouldn't happen because the government had learned its lesson from that experience. Evidently it hasn't. Maybe they could use Gordon Brown's calculator to rejig the figures. He's good at hiding spending by not declaring it.

The government have also promised a further 1000 rail carriages to ease congestion on the railways - be prepared for Congestion Charging here soon.

The fact that their are hundreds of empty carriages in sidings around the country has not sunk in. They're there because the rail companies refuse to pay the extortionate lease payments. Therefore they've taken carriages out of service, increased congestion and raised fares.

Privitisation of the railways was a mess from the start. The railways should have been split along pre-nationalisation lines with the companies overseeing all aspects of running the railways they used. Instead we had locomotives and rolling stock owned by finance companies, track maintenance owned by a separate company and the operators in the middle.

The highlight has been several fatal crashes. The last of which, in Cumbria, saw people pressing for maintenance to be devolved to local managers. What they didn't realise was that the local managers were the people responsible. They had been reported and a troubleshooting team had been dropped on them prior to the crash.