The Wardman Wire

The Carpet baggers aiming to turn sporting success into party political advantage have started already, and the ex-Sports Minister Richard Caborn MP is first out of the blocks with an article over at Labour Home.

This is annoying - a commenter on Political Betting had the right attitude with a comment that the best way for the Labour Government to benefit from the Olympic success is to keep quiet and bask in the reflected glory.

Instead, Mr Caborn has stuck his oar in, got a lot of things wrong and ended up looking rather silly - as well as being an opportunist out to exploit Olympic success in the course of grubby politics.

The fact that he is posting at Labour Home is interesting - there’s an interesting debate to be had about how the relationships between official parties and grassroots websites will evolve - across all parties.

But for now, a little light rebuttal over afternoon coffee beckons.

“Why Labour can be proud of the Olympics”

writes former sports minister Richard Caborn

If you are referring to the performance at Beijing - yes. The jury is still out on London 2012.

What a great week it’s been to be British! Our Olympians have done this country proud.

Yep. Not so when politicians try to use them as a political football, however.

It is a far cry from Thatcher selling playing fields at the rate of forty a month to every supermarket developer who could make a fast buck out of our sporting heritage, to the headlines this weekend – “Golden weekend for British sport”, “Best for nearly a hundred years!”

Citation for the 40 a month figure? The figure appears to come from Charles Clarke in 1999:

The government estimates that in 1997 sales of school playing fields were running at 40 a month, and says applications are now down to about a dozen a month.

“The government estimates” is hardly convincing looking back after you have spent years claiming exclusive credit for the “longest period of economic growth for 100 years”, when in reality many of the hard decisions were taken by the last Tory government - who also presided over the first third of the period of growth.

By the way, how did you bring Mrs Thatcher into events that were happening in 1997? Back to Mr Caborn:

It is thanks to a Labour government, along with far-sighted Labour Councils like Manchester and Sheffield who in 1991 staged the World Student Games without a penny of lottery funding, that we have world-class training facilties. Sheffield alone now has one of the best suites of sports facilities in Europe – Ponds Forge swimming and diving, the Don Valley stadium, The Ice Centre and the English Institute for Sport.

I understand that - despite being vigorously commercial - Pond’s Forge is subsidised to the tune of £1m a year (20%+ of turnover) by the Council (which is now a LibDem / Lab switcher after 70 years of Labour control) - partly as a result of disenchantment after the debts left over from the World Student Games continued to cost the city £22m a year. That may all be justified, but it’s not as clear cut as you are suggesting.

Without the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002 and its Velodrome, we may not have won the right to stage London 2012, and definitely would not have become the best cycling nation on earth. None of this, remember, thanks to the Tories. We have put ‘great’ back into Great Britain this weekend. However, we are only half way there. For the elite athletes, it’s all about building on the Beijing success for London 2012.

Hmmm. Leaving out the trumpet-blowing at the end, the Manchester Velodrome website says:

• “The Centre was developed as a joint venture between the Sports Council, Manchester City Council and the British Cycling Federation. Funding was provided by the Government, through the Department of the Environment (£6.5m), the Sports Council (£2m) and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts (£1m). “
• “The Centre opened in September 1994.”

So the Velodrome was built with 90% funding provided by a Tory Government and the rest by a Foundation funded by (I think) the Pools Industry, and all totally developed and opened in a period of Conservative Government.

So much for “none of this, remember, thanks to the Tories”.

In reality the historic turning point in British Cycling was 1992 when Chris Boardman worked with Lotus to win Olympic Gold on the “Superbike“. Everyone has contributed since, and they have done a huge amount with a very small budget (£2.6m a year for the Elite operation even now).

By trying to get political advantage from a rewriting of history, not based on the facts, you make yourself look ridiculous.

On participation, we are delivering three million hours a week more on sport in our schools than in 2001. But we need to double that by 2012. I saw how the Tories had left the Labour government with the most demoralised sporting family you could imagine. As Sports Minister, I had to build a lot of bridges!

But Labour have over the last 12 years turned this around with investment into schools, governing bodies of sport, coaching and very importantly, volunteering.

The sport governing bodies have now been modernised and we are becoming internationally recognised once again as a great sporting nation. More has to be done and that’s why a Labour government needs, for sports sake and the 2012 Olympics, a ‘fourth term.’

More trumpet blowing - some of which may be justified and some of which looks fishy, but I find it more than a little ironic that the sports that have provided the steadiest flow of medals through the last 25 years have been precisely those that have been most traditionalist and independent of your type of government - to wit, rowing and sailing.

Wrapping up

A final question: were all those years by your Councils spent crusading against “unhealthy competitive sports” a good idea?