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What the Olympics tell us about modern Britain + Fiction special
By Alice Gribbin [1] Published 09 August 2012 11:59What the Olympics tell us about modern Britain + Fiction special
In this week’s New Statesman cover story, the former England cricketer and NS columnist, Ed Smith, considers how the Olympics can “reboot” Great Britain. Sceptics, writes Smith, once argued that the Games have become detached from sport; in which case “the logic follows that Britain must have succeeded at something much more important”.
While “[a]rguing that a sports tournament could heal the scars [of last summer’s riots] sounds quixotic,” the Olympics has provided the “surface and the pretext . . . the opportunity to reboot” the capital – or even the country. One logic, at least, has been left underexplored:
Team GB could not have won many of its medals without the support of the state. Only a few sports can nurture elite athletes (and their coaches, equipment and nutritionists) in a free market; most require handouts from the taxpayer.
And Smith draws a parallel between the success of the Olympic champion Mo Farah and that of London itself, host city of the Games:
[C]oldly calculating, London should be able to stage a great Games, just as Farah was favourite to win the 10,000 metres. But somehow that only exacerbated the tension. It was hard, watching the race, not to imagine all the ways in which it could go wrong . . . We had all imagined similarly disastrous scenarios for the whole Games . . . Farah’s victory brought to life what we had hoped these Olympics would be about.
Following the Q2 reports of a 0.7 per cent drop in GDP – confirmation that Britain is in a double-dip recession – the New Statesman’s economics editor, David Blanchflower, predicts growth for the year of below -1 per cent: “a long way from the 2.8 per cent predicted for 2012 by the Office for Budget Responsibility in its cloud-cuckoo-land ‘emergency’ Budget forecast of June 2010”.
The data from the quarter, writes Blanchflower, points to “a collapse in construction, driven by the coalition’s decision to kill off public investment”. Data from the ONS and RICS survey show no sign of private-sector recovery to offset the cuts, “leaving little optimism for recovery in the near future.”
Employment data is also consistent with this trend. Blanchflower notes, through comparison of the UK and US’s labour markets of the last two years, that “in job-creation terms, Barack Obama and his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, easily beat Cameron and Osborne”.
This week’s Critics opens with “A kindness”, a new short story about hope, charity and a chance encounter in Britain’s bleak winter by Adam Foulds, the award-winning author of 2009’s The Quickening Maze.
Elsewhere in this Fiction special, Leo Robson, the NS’s lead fiction reviewer, explores the lofty ambitions of first-time novelists; Claire Lowdon is only faintly amused by Nicola Barker’s Man Booker Prize-longlisted novel, The Yips; Jonathan Coe admires Javier Marías’s attempts to reimagine the novel and Sophie Elmhirst meets the essayist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson.
Ed Miliband’s new political guru, Tim Soutphommasane, is the subject of this week’s NS Profile. Speaking to George Eaton, Soutphommasane explains why “liberal patriotism” holds the key to Labour’s success at the next election:
“The task of rebuilding and reshaping the British economy after the financial crisis and after austerity is something that could be a patriotic project.”
He argues that the success of the Olympics and the praise for Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony is an opportunity for Ed Miliband to redefine the debate over national identity:
“Sometimes political parties can let these moments do the work for them. But the patriotic goodwill generated by the Olympics does provide an opportunity for Labour. It is almost as though Boyle has managed to pave the way for a new chapter of British nation-building.”
Peter Wilby on Lords reform, work-life balance and snacking on salad in First Thoughts
In the Politics Column Rafael Behr explores whether the coalition is tearing itself apart
In the NS Essay, Malcolm Beith reports from the vicious drug war in Mexico
John Burnside on Berlin’s wild wasteland in the Nature column
All this and more in this week's issue of the New Statesman, coverdated 13 August 2012, and available on newsstands around the country from today or for purchase online here [2]