English football’s Premiership, the best league in the world? The same four clubs, well give or take one perhaps, could be jotted down on a scrap of paper every August with a cast-iron guarantee they will fill the Champions League places, year in, year out. Tedium: it’s the brand value the Premiership has become past […]
Posts Tagged ‘Olympics’
One year on: why sport matters for the left
Jun 25th, 2013 by Mark Perryman.Of course how fast an individual can run, how far they can chuck an object, how high they can jump hardly matters at all in the greater scheme of global justice and human rights. But that isn’t what is being claimed on behalf of sport here. Rather it is the grand emotional narrative sport can […]
Blacklisters should be barred from public contracts
Jan 24th, 2013 by Ian Lavery.Ian Lavery’s speech in parliament on blacklisting (abridged from Hansard) The blacklisting of trade unionists is an unfair and insidious practice that involves the systematic compilation of information about individual trade unionists by their employers and recruiters in order to discriminate against them, although not just because they are members of trade unions. There are […]
The best of the rest: the economy, books and culture
Dec 31st, 2012 by Newsdesk.Yesterday, we gave you our top picks from our year’s coverage of Labour politics. Today, we’ve put the spotlight on the issues we’ve discussed that aren’t so closely related to party democracy and the like – and there’s quite a range. In May, Britain was graced with the appearance of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul […]
Olympics: a stimulus for the UK economy?
Sep 1st, 2012 by Murad Qureshi.London Assembly member MURAD QURESHI looks back at past few weeks of Olympic and Paralympic fever, and assesses whether the much-talked of legacy will materialise. It was always going to be difficult to compete with the spectacle of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, yet Danny Boyle came up with a very distinctive, eccentric, and thus […]
The good, the bad and the orbit
Aug 14th, 2012 by Mark Perryman.Having written a book entitled ‘Why The Olympics Aren’t Good For Us’ I might have been expected to be crying into my energy drink for the past joyful few weeks for having such a woeful lack of judgement. Not a bit of it.
What we can learn from the Olympics – the benefits of state intervention
Aug 13th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.After an unexpectedly brilliant Olympics – 29 golds and 65 medals, unprecedented for more than a century since 1908 – pleading questions are being asked whether it will bring about a transformation of Britain. It will not. It has certainly provided an enormous morale boost for the national psyche and made a naturally self-deprecating and […]
A big thank you to Ken for the multicultural Olympics
Aug 13th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.No matter that I am not a sports enthusiast and was, in advance, a firm Olympic sceptic, it is hard not to be enthusiastic about the Games, sport, razzmatazz, community events and all. Above all, it did appear to deliver on the promise, Ken’s promise, of celebrating London’s multiculturalism – it positively oozed diversity and […]
BBC feature before Olympic 200m final amounted to “far right propaganda”
Aug 13th, 2012 by Claire Wadey.On Thursday night, BBC1 broadcast a 5 minute film (1 Hour 34 mins into the evening Olympic coverage) which gave credence to the theories of the far right and was highly offensive to disabled people in particular. During peak viewing, immediately ahead of the Olympic men’s 200m final, the BBC was broadcasting the statement: “Eugenics was the […]
The Gender Games
Aug 10th, 2012 by Mark Perryman.A World record crowd for a Women’s Football match. Three more Team GB Golds, all won by women athletes. The first ever Women’s boxing Gold, again won by a Team GB athlete. That was just yesterday, Thursday, at London 2012. For Team GB these Games have perhaps represented the single biggest challenge to the traditional […]