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thomas davison

So the Games transformed Britain?
Tell that to tragic Jay's family
By Peter Hitchens
PUBLISHED: 03:57, 16 September 2012 | UPDATED: 04:00, 16 September 2012
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..At last it�s over, six weeks of glutinous self-praise, smugness and delusion.

You might think, from the way that we�ve gone on about it, that organising an athletics meeting was a gigantic task equal to putting a man on the Moon, or finding a cure for cancer.

You might also get the idea that the entire nation lives its life in front of a TV screen, and that because TV is enthusiastic about an event, the rest of us are too.

Stabbed to death: Jay Whiston, 17, was killed at a gatecrashed party in Colchester, Essex
My belief and hope is that quite a lot of people, apart from me, thought that the Olympic frenzy was overdone and overblown.

A strange zombie-like thought control descended on this country during the Games. If you weren�t keen, you were somehow a bad person.

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Just as in the early days of Blairism, and during the even more stage-managed creation of David Cameron as Mr Blair�s replacement, the reliable followers of fashion and the habitual suckers and dupes of public life all joined the choir of compulsory joy.
They said how wonderful it was that our bankrupt country was blowing nine billion pounds on a big party we couldn�t afford. There are always people like that.

But there was worse to come. One by one, men and women who I thought had independent minds stepped forward, like defendants at a show trial, to announce that they, too, had been converted by the beatific vision of Olympic piffle.

Yes, I was a curmudgeon to start with,� they would intone, dashing tears from their eyes. �But now I have put my doubts behind me. I Love Big Brother.� Well, actually, they didn�t say they loved Big Brother, but these recantations did strongly remind me of Winston Smith�s gin-scented collapse into the arms of conformity at the end of George Orwell�s 1984.

Let me remind you. During this supposed national triumph, our courts were still dealing with (and in some cases letting off) the culprits of the violent disorders of 13 months ago. It was still possible for a fine young man, Jay Whiston, to be knifed to death for behaving courageously at a suburban party. HMS Ark Royal, the idiotically retired mainstay of our naval power, was condemned to the scrapyard. Our chief surviving weapons manufacturer was threatened with foreign takeover.

A great tidal wave of inflation, whose arrival is only a matter of time, was being created by the major banks of the Western world.

In every town and city of this country, small businesses are suffering and dying. In large parts of the North, former shopping streets are parades of shuttered and abandoned premises stretching for miles like a British Detroit.

Not one of our national accounts balances. The Government is borrowing frantically to maintain services it cannot afford to supply. We buy far more than we sell. Even the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has finally noticed that our schools are terrible, and that all the Blairite hoo-ha about �education� had precisely no result (just as Michael Gove�s current hoo-ha will fail).

But take comfort. We have one growth industry. This country has never had so many cannabis farms, nor so many willing customers for their produce.