The political machinery

Support for the Olympics was won by the London 2012 media strategy. The campaign worked assiduously to inhibit public discussion through a process of narrative containment and image management. There has also been a concerted promotion of the Olympic proposals by the Labour local authorities, and by Tessa Jowell in the run up to the May 2006 local elections. Promotion of the Olympic event has been caught up in the self aggrandizement and structural cohesion of the New Labour party machine.

Concurrently, a communicative fixity underlining the consultation process predicated public response as affirmative. To quote Michael Hardt and Toni Negri: the communicative machinery of the post Fordist state "integrate[s] the imaginary and the symbolic within the biopolitical fabric, [...] integrating them into its very functioning". "The imaginary is guided and channelled through the communicative machine. [...] The political synthesis of social space is fixed in [this] space of [mediation]" (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p 33).

Planning process around the Olympic proposals has been deployed as a binding and coercive agent of what geographer Neil Brenner has described as "a major re calibration of social power relations mediated in and through the state apparatus"; commenting, "emergent patterns of authoritarian statism [also] entail a significant enhancement of the state's role in mobilising space as a productive force" (Antipode, 2001).

This is acutely visible in planning and economic development process at a local level where the local state is restructuring its relation to the repressive apparatus through neo liberal 'democratic' paradigms, and the enhancement of bylaw prohibitions with individualised spatial and social regulation.

Powers of London's Mayor have recently been up for review (February 2006). Relevant to Olympic related applications, for defined categories of strategic planning applications the Mayor himself and his successors are able to direct a local authority planning department to grant planning permission where it was intending to refuse, and for a wider range of applications to be regarded as 'strategic' and thus referred to himself. He and his successors also now have the power of direction over local authority Local Development Plans (July 2006).

There is a undoubtedly a distinctive centralisation of decision making to the Mayor under the new framework and a loss of accountability previously afforded at a local level in the formulation of local plans, something that conflicts with the EU's subsidiarity principle (that is, that decision making should take place at the lowest possible level).

In effect, the Mayor has substituted himself as conflict adjudicator of last resort for the Secretary of State, although Livingstone stated that was not proposing that Ministers' current powers of call in and direction should be removed, and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) consultation document confirmed that if the Mayor's proposals were introduced that the Secretary of State would still need the power to intervene with a direction to refuse the Mayor's ruling.

Olympic planning decisions have already been made within closed systems of reference. The Olympic Joint Planning Authorities Team (JPAT), the regulatory body charged with modifying Olympic planning applications and advising local authorities on their viability and the issues that the planning applications raise, is part of the London Development Agency, itself a constituent body of the Mayor's Greater London Authority (GLA); the LDA also submitted the Olympic planning applications in the first place and this would be the case with other strategic proposals. Responsibility for consultation around planning applications lies with the developing company, but for strategic planning applications such as the Olympic developments, where the initial developer is the LDA, there has been concurrently a corporate mission to enthuse (to socialise support, by the Mayor as well as the GLA and its offshoot London 2012) not just to consult (undertaken by both JPAT and consultants). Referenda are not a statutory part of the deliberative process.

Now, with no local authority autonomy to contest centralised decision making, strategic planning applications will be passed, in effect, by a combination of Mayoral fiat and publicity. Businesses and residents faced with compulsory purchase orders previously had a far more limited framework with which to contest their removal. However, increased Mayoral powers could be argued to overcome the social closure associated with locality politics (relocation of Travellers a case in point).

Proposals that might be considered 'strategic' often generate the most public outcry: airport runways, tube and rail proposals (such as Crossrail), sewage, water and waste facilities, demolition for parks, and the Thames Gateway developments spring to mind. While strategic infrastructure has its own validity, it is insidious that debate and local influence over planning applications and the location of facilities should be curtailed.

ODPM reasoning also seems a little uncomfortable. Their consultation document The Greater London Authority: The Government's Proposals for Additional Powers and Responsibilities for the Mayor and Assembly Consultation Paper, November 2005, linked increased Mayoral powers to the GLA duty toward sustainable development, suggesting that if, for instance, action to prevent global climate change would benefit from such an increase in Mayoral authority, then such an increase might be justified simply within the terms of this responsibility.

With the Olympic proposals, campaigners found that local authorities too were stuck in a normative paradigm of 'opportunity', something institutionalised in neo liberal models of qualification for public sector managers and the managerialist ethos (and training) of planners, and bolstered by barriers to local government finance.

In London, there has been a lack of consultation with local groups, compounded by inadequate notice for meetings. In Hackney, council officials lacked knowledge of the extent of proposals, making promises that turned out to be false when the plans were published. Local authorities are starved of money, officials grab any opportunity or face being left out. Opposition is effectively silenced.
Anne Woollett, Chair, Hackney Marsh User Group

Considerations of democratic deficit might also note that the Olympic Delivery Authority has been set up as an urban development corporation. The ODA will act as its own planning authority over the Olympic precinct area. There will be no formal applications within this area for the public to comment on now the authority is up and running.

The LDA have appeared for some time to be circumventing their own regulatory modifications. Grampian conditions concerning a statutory mandate to provide exchange land attached to the applications by the JPAT team as part of the institutional review process have been legislated out in parliamentary process around the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Bill.

Attempts to lobby the Lords over this surprise amendment have found it hard to make headway, not least because peers are often absent from the chamber, but also because the Olympic event enjoys so much cross party support, the matter become a question of loyalty. The combination of closed systems of decision making, party disciplinary mechanisms and image generated support is blatantly totalitarian.

The LDA also reneged on Grampian conditions to relocate non-registered residents of the Clays Lane and Waterden Road Travellers' sites in a review.

TV and press messaging

This section is taken from a leaflet by Project Mimique, October 2005.

Media treatment of the London 2012 Olympic bid revealed a narrative striving for credibility as index of locality and a re mediation of Olympic tradition (Cohen, 2004), exposing a simulacrum of modernity, a policy discourse of self development and economic development (Cooke, 1988), bolstered by the depoliticising mediation of multiculturalism. After the bid decision on July 6 and the subsequent bombings, Trevor Phillips described the London Olympics as "recognition that our capital offers the best real world answer that humanity has to the challenge of ethnic and religious diversity" (The Observer, July 10, 2005).

But one might counter that media treatment of the Olympic bid and London 2012 media strategies are, in fact, raised as post fascist mystifications. Backed up by attacks on civil liberties and a generalisation of racist policing, surface forms of this mystification included, alongside multiculturalism, the body without obstacles, and the nation state. This is consistent with the broadcast media and the Blair government's flirtations with the repressive consensus of Modell Deutschland, the anti communist moral rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.

Much of the Olympic promotion was achieved via TV news broadcasts, and ITN were explicit in their support for the bid. The televised message has a finality which is not so much a function of its actual referent content as of its relation between the sensory receiver and the referent (McLuhan in Guiraud, p 17). Viewers are receptive, and implicated in the communication of the message. There is a one dimensionality involved. The socialised viewer provides the message with each repetition of coverage; a moment of narrative stability in the heterogenous media flux (which is itself a process of containment), fixing the viewer as spectator and as benignly affirmative.

The shift from cynicism to an affirmative interest was built by this technique - a reduction of content to the extent that the image (devoid of intrinsic signification) was really all that was there, reinforced by a proiaretic impulsion towards closure of the (simple) enigma (would London win?). The bid promoters constantly reiterated that the bid itself was competent; the press and Mayor Ken Livingstone that there would be 'quality' regeneration for the Lower Lea Valley. These 'facts' were challenged by no one except No London 2012. Such aestheticisation is the process of myth.

Dealing with a televisual phenomenon, one is acutely aware of the process of spectacularisation (the social relations of uneven development mediated by the functional image of bureaucratic 'glad handing'), state mobilisation of citizens in affirmation of an image in itself - honed multi racial bodies, sporting and moral excellence, and a call for 70,000 volunteers to staff the event - the containment of mass society via a manipulation of individual subjectivity and agency, and a reduction of politics to a question of sport ("Are you for or against a London Olympics?"). More recently, the London 2012 website reduced this figure to 50,000, but the scale hardly diminishes.

Fringe events

The production of supportive individuals and organisations is also being ensured via the populist charade of a "cultural fringe" (originally billed as starting in 2004; now put back to 2008), toted local synergies of "creative" subcontracting and recruitment (London 2012: 2004/2), and an ongoing call for sporting and other volunteers. Proposals for the period of the Games themselves include special performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe Theatre, along with a month long Olympic Proms. Any local cultural programme seems stalled currently at the level of discussion, although the panel for the Government's Cultural Olympiad Culture and Creative Advisory Forum has been announced (July 25, 2006).

In a savage irony, with the active collusion of environmental organisations, the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV), and Groundwork, Olympic volunteering (conservation labour) is toted as corporate team building and leadership training for youth (London 2012, 2004/1), a formalist refraction counterpointed by the Environment Agency extolling the virtues of redeveloped "green and attractive river corridors" for "social cohesion", including benefits for physical and mental health (letter from Deborah Coates to Hackney Council Environment Directorate, 2003). In fact, twenty five years of voluntary environmental labour in the Lower Lea Valley, undertaken often by local residents, are being destroyed by the Olympic proposals. Habitat management organisations seem happy to act as tools of neo liberal social policy and in the past at least one, BTCV, has undermined practical conservation as a livelihood by enforcing low pay.

In 2003, the Home Office floated a proposal for the incorporation of habitat management and maintenance of canal paths as forced labour within the criminal justice system for non-payment of court fines, a variant of workfare options (over the last 20 years) for the long-term unemployed and prison labouring. On February 10, 2006, Alan Travis reported in The Guardian that persons convicted of minor crimes, that now would receive a 12 month or less prison sentence, would be required to undertake unpaid work to cut down prison numbers. The government's five year plan which contained this announcement included work on Olympic site preparation specifically. This is tantamount to the reintroduction of hard labour (or penal servitude) and links Olympic developments into what is known in the USA as the prison industrial complex.

Since the bid decision, the Olympic event and its preparations have been co opted as a vehicle for the New Labour Respect Action Plan, evoking a stigmatisation of young people as routinely violent against both property and populace. At a meeting on January 24, 2006, in Leyton, headlined 'How the Olympics can strengthen our community', Tessa Jowell, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, described young people as responsible for a "debasement of society", the mere sight of them causing others "a sense of apprehension". Sport is projected as building "community cohesion" and organised activities such as boxing (so reminiscent of the 1940s) suggested on a national basis as diversion from graffiti and menace. Jowell also promoted skills training and ending a national depreciation of success. She said that she was in the process of visiting every London borough, demanding "Where is your business plan for the Games?". New Labour contested the May 2006 local elections across east London with an offensive against so called "anti social behaviour". Such a co option could be interpreted as little more than rather base electioneering (the Benthamite zeal of Edwin Chadwick combined with the formal distractions of synchronised swimming).

However, one person in the audience, Keith Prince of Waltham Forest Respect Party, noted a fascist nuance reminiscent of the Nazi's Strength Through Joy programme of the 1930s, after hearing Tessa Jowell's speech. Such naked party ambition was underlined by the presence of a number of young people brought in for the occasion as virtuous exemplars, dressed in the red uniforms of Waltham Forest's SafetyNet Community Partnership Unit Young Wardens. Tessa Jowell also took the 2012 Olympics on a three week 'roadshow' around the UK (promotion of volunteering was one of the key themes), and a 'Business Summit' at Canary Wharf on economic benefit during July 2006.

It is imperative to call into question the government's communitarian ethos - the constitution of the 'responsible subject' (now the 'managerial', 'creative', 'sporting', and 'tidy', subject)- here building through the global signifier of sustainable development (and bolstered separately by an evocation of 'art', 'administration' and 'order'). The call for 70,000 (now 50,000) volunteers for the Olympic event is reminiscent of the voluntary postwar construction of the Budapest Népstadion in Stalinist Hungary (contemporaneous with Hungarian dictator Mátyás Rákosi's Ready to Work and Fight Movement of sporting youth), and represents the formal elevation of the Games to a transcendent goal (beyond conflict) and an attempted synchronisation of the subject reconstituted as 'national' ('Make Britain Proud') with the moral ideologies of the state.

This essay is part of the Games Monitor briefing papers available for download from our Media Centre page.