Not playing the Games

DURING the February half-term holiday I was in London with my family. It was unusually clean, the Tube ran on time, officials were friendly and even smiled broadly. Being in London was a real pleasure. It was not a dream - I discovered that the International Olympic Committee was visiting London at the time to consider 'the bid'. For London, everything had to be right.

I get very annoyed by London. Sometimes people say that, as a northerner, I have a chip on my shoulder about the place. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have a huge sack of potatoes. The United Kingdom is dominated by London in a truly appalling way, and the rest of us simply let it happen. The result is that most of the country feels second class while London itself is beginning to grind to a halt as it continues to grow.

I am not talking here about the so-called North-South divide. Tell the people of Cornwall, Birmingham or the Welsh valleys that there is a North-South divide and they laugh; the real divide is between the London-dominated south east of England and the rest of us. Pockets of depravity in Tower Hamlets do nothing to take away from the obvious wealth, power and celebrity centred in London, made more obvious by the huge migration of population to the South East.

There is one issue which has made my blood boil on the subject and that is London's bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Notice how spokesmen often talk about Britain's bid. Nonsense. The Olympics will be held in a city, not a country.

Obviously the sailing events have to be held at the coast, but otherwise the world will descend on London. London sits very handily close to Europe but in a fairly distant corner of our islands.

Laughably, I heard one spokesman explain that the football competition will happen all over the country. Maybe he didn't know but we don't enter a team for the football competition; we don't care about it.

What sort of country are we? We are declaring to the world that, in fact, there is only one city in Britain that matters. In our third attempt to host the Olympics we are offering the same city as on the last two occasions (1908 and 1948).

In fact, only two other cities have hosted the games twice, Paris and Los Angeles, and no city has held the games three times. Yet other countries have managed to find more than one city: the US has had three venues, Australia has held the games in Melbourne and Sydney and Germany has hosted the games in Berlin and Munich. One of the competitor cities this time is Madrid, which previously held the Olympics in Barcelona.

Several years ago we seemed in Britain to allow different cities to try to bid for the Olympics; I remember the two bids of Birmingham and Manchester. Now the all-conquering capital has dismissed any other city.

A few years ago I was so irritated by this that I wrote to my local MP. I was amazed to receive a reply from the then Sports Minister Kate Howey. In her reply Ms Howey explained that the International Olympic Committee would not consider a bid from any other British city than London. Just register that last sentence, read it again. Isn't that terrible? In a country of 60 million people, with many historic and proud cities, there is only one acceptable to an international committee. Rather than accept that, surely we should be looking at ways of improving our large cities so that others may have an international reputation.

For most of us, seeing any Olympic events will be incredibly expensive. Not only will tickets have to be bought, but travel on the most expensive journeys in the country and overnight stays will all have to be considered. Of course, that will not affect the national media which is all based in London, nor our "local" MPs who all have flats there.

I even feel that writing this article is almost pointless. You're reading it of course, but nobody who is likely to make a decision will read it. These people often claim they read "all the papers", by which they mean the nationals - most of which are produced by Londoners.

I was talking recently to somebody involved in trying to bid for money to have a new tram system in Leeds. They were told that this would be severely delayed because so much money is needed to improve London's transport infrastructure in preparation for the Olympics.

Already London has virtually every national museum, it has Twickenham and the new Wembley Stadium and it is going to get the best sporting facilities in the world. This is all at our expense as taxpayers. What do we get? An annexe to the National Railway Museum in Shildon.

One of the major problems of course is that while London is one, the rest of the country is diverse. It is surely time for the disparate parts of the United Kingdom to unite to say that London gets too much.

I would be happy for the Olympics to be held in, say, Southampton, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow. This is not about our region against London; it is about the utter domination of London in our country.

And it is not only us who suffer. Talk of the Thames Gateway means the Government still expects the population of London and its surrounds to grow enormously. The result is increased overcrowding and awful damage to the countryside. The domination of London actually harms the ordinary people of London themselves. If such energy and money were spent on other parts of the UK, some of the pressure might be taken off London and the South-East.

We could begin by failing to win this bid for the Olympics and making another of our cities so wonderful that the International Olympic Committee recognises that this is a big nation and not a city state like Monaco.

* Paul Walker, Chaplain of St Luke's Hospital, Middlesbrough, is writing in a personal capacity.