Tagged with Olympics

Mark Perryman reviews the best of this summer’s sports books

boykoff comps.inddEnglish 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 masters at providing, yet barely a word of dissent ever breaks through the breathless excitement football’s boosterists provide across the print, TV and radio media.

Meantime despite the sportification of society levels of participation in scarcely any form of physical activity continue to rocket downwards. Football, the richest and most high profile of all sports has amongst the sharpest rates of decline in numbers taking part, unless of course we count watching it from the comfort of our own sofa Continue reading →

One year on: why sport matters for the left

London 2012: How was it for us?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 help construct, arguably in the early twenty-first century more effectively and more internationally, than any single other cultural pursuit.

Apart from the most miserabalist, or socially isolated, section of the Left that is surely something we can all agree upon, whether we like it or not. With the possible exception of web 2.0. no other cultural form comes close to sport in terms of its global appeal. But then who apart from the geekiest of the Geeks is going to cheer on Apple vs Microsoft in the way millions cheered on London 2012’s Super Saturday of Grandstanding athletics.

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Blacklisters should be barred from public contracts

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 people on blacklists who are not members of trade unions, but who have merely been to their employer and exercised their rights under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, as Dave Anderson said. If there is something wrong in the workplace, there is a duty under that Act to report it. As far as we are aware, people have suffered the consequences of doing that. Continue reading →

The best of the rest: the economy, books and culture

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 Krugman, who demolished the myths of austerity on an intensive media tour. The significance of his commentary was picked up by our commentator Michael Burke in September.

Our founder, Michael Meacher, has offered top commentary on the economy throughout the year. A scan – yes, a scan! – of the print version of his Guardian letter on the “scourge of our wealth divide” was popping up all over Facebook for weeks, and was retweeted over 8,000 times. He has writtenscores of articles on the economic situation over 2012 – this one on the European context keeps getting hits.

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Olympics: a stimulus for the UK economy?

(Picture: China Daily)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 very British opening ceremony for the Games in London. It showed Britain as an open, multicultural society and was an apt tribute to the history of the United Kingdom. It has helped us feel good about ourselves for a while.

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