Is it worth £3.3 BILLION to hold the OLYMPIC GAMES in London

[JoolsToo]

here

Just pondering where that amount of money could be better spent

Preventing hospital departments being closed down
Herceptin and other cancer drugs
Education
etc etc

DC also, Crossrail is far from dead in our borough.

I might have to eat humble pie. DS participates in a sport (far outside of London) and there is now a rumour that one of the Olympic events will be held at our local venue.... Which would cause hugely wonderful upgrades to the general facility.

I still don't like all the hoopla, but at least I couldn't grumble that it didn't benefit me or mine, any more.

I would much rather see this kind of money be put towards the NHS, education, more police etc.

However, i do think that the olympics in london is a good thing. spending an obscene amount on it pisses me off.

I know what you mean, and even though in the big picture that kind of money isn;t that big amoubt, it still annoys me that Units are sut, nurses are sacked, and one now has to pay for a retunr to Nursing course....even though we do need those Units and nurses!

Tigermoth, the only efficient part of the London Olympics is the way the BBC and other parts of the media have become part of the spin machine.

I've no doubt courses for all sorts of trades are happening. But would you have read about these normally ?
Would there really have been a news item about a course in construction ?
I lived in Stratford for 13 years, and live not far from it now. There are dozens of organisations trying to upgrade the skills of the locals.
They don't get much publicity, unless they are useful to the sporty mafia.

I'm 100% behind teaching this sort of stuff, and taking it away from the malignly incompetent Newham council. When given a huge wad of cash to improve the skills of the unemployed much of it was wasted on "courses" like an Urdu for Women project. Lovely purpose built centre, achieved precisely nothing.

For the 10-12 billion the Olympics are costing us we could train every single unemployed person in Britain in any skill whatsoever, including the next generation of RAF fighter pilots (about 8 million quid each as I recall).

DC our local council funded newspaper regularly (ie fortnightly) reports on training and job schemes, to publicise them to local people. There is also a local labour and business agency that works with local businesses and organisations to train people up and match them with job opps here. Local people are give some preference over people from outside the borough. This has all been in full swing and heavily publicesed ever since the regeneration of this area got underway - years before the Olympics.

How much exactly does 5 or 10 billion work out per head of the UK population?

Too much!

Tigemoth, you seem to be saying that the regeneration was happening anyway (which is how I understood it) rather than it being dependent on the Olympics. My fear is that the thijngs that are good about the area are going to be destroyed. As I have already said, there is no point ion regenerating an area if it then prices locals out of the market.

DC, don't get me started on Newham Council! I'm a believer in decisions being taken by local authorities rather than centralised government wherever possible, but there are some exceptions!

Dara, the 10 billion wasted on the Olympics is about 150 for every man, woman and child in Britain.

That's not enough to retrian them but I'm focusing on the unemployed which (depending your definition) is about 1.7 million, call it 7,500 per head.
You can teach Excel for 2-3K, a skill that is in seriouisly short supply for well paying jobs.
Obviously we don't need another million poeple like this, but there are shortages all over the economy.

However my model has the ability to predict things.
Soon you will read about how the unemployed around the epicentre of the Olympics are being trained in "web design". This is a standard scam preying on funds earmarked for the low paid & unemployed.
There is almost no market for these skills in a grossly over saturated market. But pretty & funky arty types find it easy to scrape off the money.

Total waste of money.

Absolutely agree, Expat.

Wannabe1974.....have just read this thread and re. your comments Thursday lunchtime: these games are not going to be in my country, nor is London the capital of the universe...or even of the UK.

Just remember that the UK is more than England.

Whereas it's true that Britain is not the same as England, it is of course more than 80% of the population.
But yes, if you ask, I thking that Cardiff or Glasgow would have made far better places to put the games. London is a working city, not these minor charity cases. Thus they have the space, and economically it doesn't really matter if they're horribly congested for a while.

'London is a working city, not these minor charity cases'

Oh, yes, DC, Cardiff and Glasgow - and anywhere that's not London - are charity cases.