Unveiled...

Opinions are like noses, you get to pick your own...

"This is the vision at the very heart of our brand," said London 2012 organising committee chief Sebastian Coe.

"It will define the venues we build and the Games we hold, and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world," he said at the London launch.

"This is an iconic brand that sums up what London 2012 is all about -- an inclusive, welcoming and diverse Games that involves the whole country," said Olympics minister Tessa Jowell.

"This logo makes me embarrassed to be English,"

"It looks like it could have been done by a six year old. I could do better with my eyes closed,"

Said contributors to the BBC's website poll.

"Its crap" said your very own Jerrychicken.

I remember doing shapes like that in the first form at Leeds Modern Grammar School when we were asked to do a design for a chocolate bar wrapper, mine must have been good because it went into an exhibition at the Leeds City Art Gallery - but that was in 1968 - and I was 11.

Wolff Olins were the design agency selected to produce it and they worked on the project for a year at a cost to the Olympic Organising Committee of £400,000 in 1968 I worked on my chocolate bar wrapper for four one hour art lessons and with a piece of coloured paper and some wax crayons managed to bring my design in at under £1.

They could have at least asked me.

One thing is proven though - we were all wondering where and how Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell were going to spend the colossal £9 billion budget that they've been granted to stage the 2012 London Olympics - I think we all know the answer to that question now, they spend money like all government departments do, without regard for value.

The only thing that us northerners can feel smug about is that its the soft-arse London rate payers who have to foot the bill.

Hey-ho, who's next for the gravy train ?

We can expect a lot of this...

Sheffield MP and apparent Sports Minister Richard Caborn has started the 2012 London Olympics spin doctoring early, or on the other hand he's pitching in late after last weeks "estimate for the final budget" revelations.

In an interview on the BBC's Politics Show he insisted that the London-centric spend for the Olympics would benefit the Yorkshire area because...well...because.

Richard is of the opinion that lots of "foreign teams" will be looking for bases in the UK during the Olympics and that Yorkshire will be an ideal place to come, and, erm, thats the benefit.

To give him the benefit of the doubt I'll go along with the fact that an Olympic team like, for instance, the USA will totally ignore the fact that the Olympic village is in South London and instead will park their collective, and sometimes very large, arses in a town or city in Yorkshire instead. On competition day the 100 metres sprinters for instance will get up early from their guest houses in Scarborough, very early, and gather ont he promenade for a quick and bracing jog before boarding the team bus for their four hour drive to London and their four hour queue around the M25 to get to the athletics stadium.

Of course thats what will happen Richard.

So the £9billion isn't that much money after all, not if its going to be spread all around the country like you say it will.

So thats alright then.

I sometimes wonder if politicians really believe the stuff they get told to say by their party spin doctors or if they sit there in the TV studios with their hands behind their backs with fingers firmly crossed chanting "I'm not lying, I'm not lying, I'm not lying..."

£9 billion of your pound coins...

So, back in November when questioned by the media, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell confessed that they didn't have a budget ready for the building, equiping and administering of the 2012 London Olympics.

At the time the press were flying kites in the region of around £9million which would be four times what we were originally told the project would cost when London won the bid - Tessa Jowells laughed off these speculative estimates as, well, speculation, and Tony Blair urged that nothing constructive would be achieved in bandying around ridiculous sums of money without foundation.

Today Tessa Jowell stood up in parliament and announce "the final estimate" for the budget.

£9.325 billion.

Don't forget, thats not the final invoice, work has barely begun on any of the projects yet - thats the "final estimate for the budget", which frankly means fook all, if a builder arrived at your house to give you a price for some building work and told you that its was his "final estimate for the budget" then I hope that you'd throw him out onto the street.

But we haven't got to worry that the final estimate for the budget has risen fourfold in two short years because Tessa assured the House of Commons that central government and The National Lottery would be picking up the tab, so thats alright then, at least they aren't spending public money on a London-centric publicity stunt like they did with the Millenium Dome are they ?

Of course the "central government" money wouldn't be taxpayers money would it, oh no, I'm sure that Tessa meant that Members of Parliament would be dipping into their own pensions fund to pay for the increased costs, and the Lottery funds, well, they come from foolish people anyway so they won't notie will they - its not as if the £2.8billion from the Lottery fund would have been spent on good causes all over the country is it ?

"There is no part of our national life that will not be enriched by hosting the games," Tessa gushed today, no I'm sure you're right Tessa, I can actually feel my life being enriched right now by the thought of 30% of my salary being spent on a two week jambouree of running races and jumping high/long/often by people for whom the original Olympic ideals are as alien as the alien in the film Alien.

And Alien II.

"Alice in Wonderland" is how Tessa was described in her capacity as lording it over the Olympics finance committee by some of her fellow MP's on the Public Accounts Committee and for once I agree with at least one group of politicians - this whole project still has five more years to grow in the same manner as the Cheshire Cat before it bursts and disappears from sight if not memory, we'll all be paying for this until we die, and then some.

London's Expensive Olympics 2012 - part two

Remember last weeks blog about how the London 2012 Olympics seemed to be, well, sort of disorganised at the moment ?

And remember last weeks blog about how we get the politicians that we deserve and about how most of them nowadays are professional politicians who come striaght from university into politics without the benefit of a real job/life experience ?

Well have a little read of this.

It seems like our professional politicians don't even have the budget ready for the construction work yet, which is probably why there doesn't seem to be much work going on at the moment, and probably explains why the International Olympic Committee were dropping hints last week that something should really be moving by now in London.

It seems like, if we don't yet know what the budget for the games is going to be, then could it just be the case that we bid for the games without knowing what the budget would be ?

And if that is the case, can you imagine the board of directors of a PLC (lets call it The UK plc), bidding for a contract without knowing what their costs would be or whether they would make a profit - or not ?

Like I say, we vote people into government who have no experience of business life and then expect them to run the largest organisation in the country - The UK plc - as if they know what they are doing.

Here's a snip from the biography of the official Olympics Minister, Member of Parliament Tessa Jowell ;

"Before her election to Parliament in 1992, Tessa had a career in psychiatric social work, social policy and public sector management."

So she was a social worker in the real world, that makes an excellent CV for the person in charge of the biggest building project in this country since the second world war, an excellent background for the person responsible for what could possibly be an £8,000,000,000 budget, I'm stuffed full of confidence, no really.

And we all know of Lord Sebastian Coe's CV for his post of Chair of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games don't we ?

Yes thats right, he, erm, ran some running races for a while and then, erm, became a politician, makes him emminently suitable for running the whole shooting match then.

They have got some professional people at the helm though - Chief Executive of the London Olympic Delivery Authority (no I don't know how many other organisations are involved either) is David Higgins - the bloke who delivered the Sydney Olympics on time and on budget, so erm, David, how about the budget then, have we got near to one yet ?