Abstract
This chapter will give a brief account of how the Games came to be awarded to London. The decision to bid for the Olympics of 2012 was taken by a few people at the commanding heights of the governing British Labour Party: Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Tessa Jowell, in consultation with a small number of senior staff and confidants. This reflected an established pattern of decision-making in the government of the time, described as ‘sofa government’ in the media and criticised in the Butler Report of 2007.1 The chapter will also discuss the implications, real and purported, for the East End of London, where the Games were staged. And it will comment, given the controversies generated in the last three decades by Olympic bids, on how little visible political opposition there appeared to be to the staging of London 2012.
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Notes
See Stephen Wagg, ‘Fat city? British football and the politics of social exclusion at the turn of the twenty-first century’, in Stephen Wagg (ed.), British Football and Social Exclusion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), pp. 14–17.
Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), p. 545.
See Gavin Poynter, ‘London: preparing for 2012’, in Gavisn Poynter and Iain MacRury (eds.), Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 183–200, p. 184.
See also Mike Lee, with Adrian Warner and David Bond, The Race for the 2012 Olympics (London: Virgin Books, 2006), p. 5.
For a full discussion, see Alan Tomlinson, ‘Olympic legacies: recurrent rhetoric and harsh realities’, Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2014), pp. 137–158.
See Joris Verhulst, ‘February 15, 2003: the world says no to war’, in Stefaan Walgrave and Dieter Rucht (eds.), The World Says No to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 1–19.
Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 6.
See Chetan Dave, The 2012 Bid: Five Cities Chasing the Summer Games (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2005), pp. 34–35.
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Abacus, 1972), p. 92.
All issues explored in Stephen Wagg and Jane Pilcher (eds.), Thatcher’s Grandchildren? Politics and Childhood in the Twenty-First Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
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© 2015 Stephen Wagg
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Wagg, S. (2015). The Games Come to London. In: The London Olympics of 2012. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326348_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326348_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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