The Beijing Olympics has displaced 1.5 million people since 2000, according to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). A new COHRE report, One World, Whose Dream? Housing Rights Violations and the Beijing Olympic Games, has found that the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to award the Games to Beijing has been a catalyst in increasing forced evictions and displacements in Beijing.

The website ‘They work for you’, referring to the various members of Parliament, Lords and Commons, contains some interesting interventions. Among the peers are the party apparatchiks who have been promoted to fill the benches on account of their ‘soundness’. One such is Lord Haworth, a former Secretary to the Parliamentary Labour Party, who made an eccentric contribution to the House of Lords debate on 17th January 2008 concerning the regeneration of the Lea Valley (see his attached speech). He states that his ‘only qualification’ for speaking is that he lived for more than 20 years in the Lower Lea Valley, which suggests that an awful lot of people are better qualified than he to speak on the subject.

Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, Miloon Kothari

There is a credibility gap between what people in local voluntary bodies have been told by professionals in the Olympic industry and what local volunteers' experiences of outcomes has been. This has happened most to those local voluntary bodies which have been affected by relocations from sites within the boundaries of the Olympic Park.

When does a building on the Olympic site become derelict? The answer, when the LDA takes it over. The 2012 blog (see below) describes a tower block, which used to belong to the University of East London, as having been 'derelict for a number of years'. So I wonder how that came about? Maybe the building was abandoned due to its appalling state. No, it was rendered derelict by the LDA after they took it over from the University of East London in the summer of 2005.

Roma in Jakubovany, Slovakia

Clays Lane Co-op under demolition Photo by Mike WellsNot the blue fence but the Fencing Hall falls out! Pity. Clays Lane residents suggested events like this could easily be held in other locations meaning their estate could have been taken out of the Park. In fact, we tried to argue that the whole Games could have been parcelled out to a range of existing facilities!

It is now reported that the hall, which is at present located next to the Athletes' Village, may not be built and the event could be relocated to the Excel Centre at a saving of £90m. Hardly an original idea and one specifically put forward by residents at the Compulsory Purchase Inquiry.