To be horrified at the cost of the olympics opening ceremony when the country is in the middle of a huge recession?

[YellowDinosaur]

I just found out today that the olympics opening ceremony is costing 27 million quid.

Dh and I are sitting watching it and while it has been very cleverly done so far there is bugger all to do with sport.

Why the fuck has so much money been spent on bloody political one up manship in staging this and what on earth is wrong with lighting the torch, having a small amount of music and letting the athletes parade in?

I mean 27 million is a truly offensive amount of money for 1 evening at the best of times but in the middle of a bloody recession it's just a smack in the face.

I am happy for my views to be challenged and will even change them if anyone can give me convincing too why this expensed is justified. Not,holding nth breath though...

I live a short distance from the Olympic stadium and to see the regeneration of Stratford and the immediate surrounding areas is amazing suddenly there are facilities, investment and a new lease of life breathed into some of these deprived areas of East London

So i'm hoping that the Olympics will leave a lasting legacy for us ordinary people long after the Games has finished. Regards the opening ceremony, you cant invite people to an Olympics then not bother to put on a decent spectacle, that's just poor lazy hosting. It's like inviting people over to your house for drinks and then leaving them to watch television all night

happybubble - I suspect it wasn't less at all The Bejing ceremony was spectacular in a different way. Ours was eccentric, funny, ironic, clever - all things that this country is and should be proud of.

How nice for East London that it has been invested in..................... what about the rest of gb.

For most of the country it has made no difference at all yet we are all paying for it.

Google has Beijing opening ceremony costed £64million so ours was a bargain!

But most of the wealth of the country is centred in London and the South East.

I imagine that there are a lot more of the top bracket wage earners here, and i'm not just talking about multi million pound bankers but average ordinary people earning 44K or more and the collection of their taxes and NI obviously helps readdress the balance in areas like Hull or other parts of the North East were the percentage of higher tax earners is consistently lower but still the taxes of Londoners are helping to provide the services for cities like this.

So in effect the wealth created and centred in London has been subsidising the rest of the country and will continue to do so. The Olympics could have been anywhere, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham but I wouldn't begrudge the people there improved facilities if these places were to host the games instead of London

Oh fuckig hell how miserable

The Olympics has to be held in one place - you can't spread the events around the country FFS. London is our capital city, deal with it. We had most of the infrastructure in place so it makes sense. Why are people so down on their capital city?!

If you miserable sods have a problem with how taxes are spent then get off MN and go and write to your MP/complain/vote instead of whining here. And before you say "it makes no difference" it would if everyone did it.

Iggly I agree it had to happen in London.

And for what it's worth, I have written, emailed, phoned and visited my mp.

But sorry if I sound miserable and whingy. I'll try and be a bit more cheerful about the fact that me and my dc will soon be squeezed into one room in a B&B, that I've had to sell all my stuff as the council won't store it, that I'm being forced into debt and a court ordered eviction because the government says that's how LAs need to approach people being made homeless and that I can't go to college to get qualifications to enable me to better support my family because the funding for childcare has been cut by the government. All because the government have no money

I'll just cheer the fuck up I guess.

Some shocking number of volunteers, tens of thousands I know, 150 hours (that's 4 weeks!) of rehearsal time, typically. Plus 4+ weeks of volunteer time within the park itself. How economically productive is all that?

Bet that stadium cost £100 million, prices of the tickets barely touched that cost (hand held LED consoles in each seat!?). Bet the closing ceremony costs at least £13 million. I sure hope the TV revenues are high.

Lousy computer connection so I can't look up any actual numbers

I loved the NHS thing, though.

But they are volunteers! They are volunteering their SPARE time - how eomonically viable is sitting on your arse MNing in your spare time?

96% of suppliers to the opening ceremony were British

Apparently the olympics have made about 1bn for Scotland in shared contracts abd extra tourist revenue which is a lot of money for a country of 6 million people. So imagine the rest of the uk must be getting something out of it.

Voles presumably those volunteers either fitted it around their existing jobs or don't work...

Jenny - really? That is fantastic.

The increasingly spurious and idiotic reasons people are now giving for disliking the ceremony and Games in general are making me laugh.

To put it in perspective, people whine incessantly about the Royal family and the public purse. The Royals take, what is it, 7 million from the civil list. But 44bn (yes billion) is generated in revenue by the Royal Brand through tourism to the UK.

The Olympics will do the same.

YANBU - it's ridiculous and disgusting.

Thank god it'll be over soon.

YABU. I don't know how much the ceremony cost but much of it had gone to UK companies. I thought the whole light show was fantastic. It is perhaps not well known that the UK leads the world in lighting design. The ceremony will have not only made money directly for the companies involved but will boost future sales of lighting and sound equipment.

It is in all our interests for UK companies to make profits and to grow. Afterall, how else will there be a growth in jobs and tax revenue?

I had friends both volunteering and with paid work at the opening ceremony. Those that volunteered are all doing it by using up annual leave and by agreeing with their employers to make up hours.

Forgot to mention, all those LED panels by each seat and all the other equipment used for the ceremony is not thrown away afterwards. It will be sold or used for other events, so hardly wasted.

CharlieUniform, your predicament is really sad and I feel horrible for you. But it isn't because the government has no money, it's because they are utter cunts.

Haha. Not wanting/caring about the Olypmics immediately makes me a miserable cow, then? Wanting the money being poured into this farce to be spent in a more productive manner means I need to cheer up? FFS.

If you genuinely believe that whatever money the Olympics makes is actually going to go anywhere but into the pockets of big business, you're deluded. So basically the whole thing is a way for already-rich people to get richer, but somehow people are getting the impression that it'll be "good" for Britain. Haha.

Waste of time and money on a bunch of fucking sport. Can't even watch/read the news properly because it's all about the bloody Olympics.
If it was something that would actually showcase something productive, like industry, or even art, that would be far better.

SailorSoldier, I live by the Olympic stadium, there has been a LOT of money pumped into the area and London in general. It is looking GREAT. So it is benefitting us.

If they put the money into art, there'd be people moaning that art is shit and pointless and if they put it all into the NHS or charity or whatever, people would moan that they were bored and there was nothing fun to see or do in the UK.

Maybe some people just need to accept that this is happening and of course they are going to put loads of money into it because otherwise the UK will look shit. There's really no point in moaning, so why not just ignore or get into the spirit?

You do realise that a lot of the money came from private sponsorship right?

If it wasn't spent on the Olympics, it wouldn't automatically have been spent on the NHS and been given out in benefits.

The fact is, there are people that struggle in this country, as there are people all over the world that struggle. But there are plenty that have done ok for themselves too. People that also pay tax, and, God Forbid, actually enjoy the Olympics. Or do those people not count because they don't deserve any consideration by their own government?

How is sport less productive than art? If you want to deconstruct sport, then surely art can be deconstructed too.

Theatre? It's just people talking on a stage.

Literature? It's just words on paper.

Music? Just notes.

Money has been spent on art through the whole Cultural Olympiad thing and the Legacy Trust.

We could have had it in the afternoon. The fireworks wouldn't have been as good but OP and the other whingers could have gone to bed early.

Likewise Team GB could have come on first. So what if they're the hosts? It's past people's bedtimes.

And I taped a lot of those songs off the Top 40 when I was a teenager. Did Danny Boyle ask me for a borrow of my cassettes?