“Fresh from the Olympic ‘hand-over’ in Beijing, London Mayor Boris Johnson on Tuesday pledged massive funding to produce a new generation of champions.
He said he wanted to ring-fence tens of millions of London Development Agency cash to inspire youngsters in the capital to take up a sport.
He said: ‘You can have the facilities but if you don’t invest in people to train and give people encouragement, it’s simply not going to work.‘”
Elements of Boris’s speech are slightly confusing:
“Sporting opportunity can be part of an early intervention strategy that tackles child poverty and under achievement.”
I’m unclear as to how sporting opportunity will ‘tackle’ child poverty. Certainly, it may enthuse children to such an extent that they don’t consider the opportunities represented by crime, but it isn’t an effective method of generating or redistributing wealth.
It’s also difficult to see how Kate Hoey – who has a somewhat fractious relationship with LOCOG after publicly opposing the London bid – will sustain enthusiasm. Nevertheless, we have reason to suspect that she may support community funding, as in a 2004 interview she asked:
“What use is an Olympic bid if you are closing pools all over the country. We are struggling at the moment to find funding for small projects such as recreational centres which are being closed down all over the country.
“Community sport has not been made a priority. Most of the money that is going into sport is going into big projects. What is the point of having big facilities when not enough money is being invested in communities and creating sports facilities at the local level.”
Funding plans will have been bolstered by the Conservatives claim that they would ban lottery money from being diverted to health and education, and instead plough over £58 million into sport.
Tags: funding · LDA · sport5 Comments
5 responses so far ↓
“I’m unclear as to how sporting opportunity will ‘tackle’ child poverty. Certainly, it may enthuse children to such an extent that they don’t consider the opportunities represented by crime, but it isn’t an effective method of generating or redistributing wealth.”
I guess this is of a piece with the wider Tory approach to child poverty, which sees Labour’s targets as ‘crudely financial’ (even though 60% of the median income is an internationally accepted measurement) and is much more comfortable with wagging their fingers at the poor – and then blaming them for their own misfortune – than with taking the redistributive measures needed to get children out of poverty.
Ah, yes, the childhood poverty of ideas.
Whatever happens his speach was brilliant.
“Ping Pong is coming home”. Phantastic!
The tables line did make me giggle, though overall feeling seems to be that he should have got aquainted with Chinese culture before denying the existence of it.
I’m not sure why that’s ‘phantastic’ – after all, we all knew before the election that Boris has a good line in comedy. I was all for keeping him there, but unfortunately a million of my fellow citizens thought he’d be better running a major metropolis. So es geht.