The English Olympic Stench

A TIRADE about the London Olympics last weekend has told us what a few feared all along, writes Clive Betts from the National Assembly press gallery.

The 2012 event is all about one country, and one only. That country is England. The other countries in the British Isles have all along a cheered in unison purely because they didn’t want to be ridiculed as killjoys and patronised by the largest nation in these islands – in particular by its mean-minded tabloid press.

The Independent on Sunday described the east London event as being borne along on “a shameful myth”.

The bid for the  2012 Games “might have been wrapped up in a Union flag, and the politicians might have been on about this ‘benefiting the whole of the UK’”, wrote James Corrigan.

“But this was always about England and only about England.”

He went on to list the way in which Lottery funds were switched from local (Welsh) projects to help pay for construction work in London; the concentration of Olympic venues in England; and the inevitable way in which commercial benefits of the entire fortnight-long event are almost entirely concentrate in the London area.

The opportunity for the diatribe is the likely decision to field in the Olympics a GB soccer team which will consist entirely of England players. It’s happened before, apparently, at the beginning of the 20^th century. But what was acceptable then isn’t today.

Corrigan takes up the hearings of the Welsh Affairs Select Committee in the Commons which cut through a lot of the hype we get from London, in particular No 10, about the glories that will flood through every part of the dear old UK.

The committee found – to no-one’s surprise, except that of the true-Brits (ie pro-English) amongst us – that hardly any business contracts were being won in Wales. Which is no surprise; where’s the profit in freighting Coke or Pepsi from Wales to east London for an event lasting a fortnight.

Especially when local businessmen (otherwise known as spivs) reckon they have everything tied up with fellow-spivs from east and south-east London, surely the worst part of Britain for decency.

The final words of Mr Corrigan should be carefully marked :

” In Scotland, Wales and Ulster there will be mutterings about English arrogance and quite rightly, too.

“This will not be a GB team, no matter what it says on the badge. It will be an English team and will be there essentially because of English pigheadedness in steamrolling over the wishes and needs of their fellow home nations.

“Too much of 2012 will be marred by that stench.”

With First Minister Rhodri Morgan firmly tuned into Britishness, and with Plaid held rather painfully by the short and curlies, it is unsurprising that not much has been said down Cardiff Bay about these shenanigans.

But one of Mr Morgan’s own group has had the courage to speak out. Leslie Griffiths, AM for Wrexham, said she “had yet to be contacted by anyone who wants Wales to take part in this project”.

She spoke of fears that Wales will lose its independence in both FIFA and UEFA. In other words, that Wales will become part of England.

The English soccer world won’t worry. Where on Earth is Wales, they will laugh.

Prime Minister Brown is a prime mover is this. He’s too late to stop the Scottish Parliament. But, as he correctly calculates, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Brown’s Britishness must be rejected.