Sunday, 24 August 2008

If we ran our Olympic team the way we run our state schools, we wouldn’t win a single medal

Peter Hitchens


Isn’t this British Olympic boasting all rather East German? 

Huge state-directed resources have been devoted to gathering supposed glory at a world sports festival. 

But these medals do not tell the truth about what sort of nation we are at all. 

In fact, they are designed to cover up the truth – that we are an international failure, that our people are increasingly fat, unfit and unhealthy, that our schools continue to lose their sports grounds to development, and that we are, for the most part, one of the least competitive and sporty countries on Earth.

 Debate with Peter Hitchens

Sarah Webb, Sarah Ayton and Pippa Wilson

Golden girls: But Britain's medal haul masks a nation's failures

What’s more, the national anthem played repeatedly in Peking is a song few of us know and almost nobody sings. 

East Germany had a similar aim when it spent millions to produce medal winners.

The country itself was a backward, dirty dump, run by horrible old men and women, shrouded in a smog of two-stroke exhaust, brown coal smoke and cabbage fumes.

But at the Olympics it managed to appear to be modern, clean, youthful and bright.

And we have to pretend that Olympic success matters, just as they did, because we have nothing else to be proud of. 

We achieve this by levying a tax on the sad, the deluded and the hopeless, called the National Lottery, and spending the money bamboozled out of these poor people on velodromes where cyclists dressed as spacemen whizz endlessly round under the cold gaze of ruthless trainers.

Our industries may have vanished, our fisheries may have been stolen, our streets may be increasingly dangerous. But, gosh, wow, we have lots of gold medals. 

And we hope to stage our own Olympics four years hence – greedily seizing the chance, as Third World nations always do, to pretend that we’re going up, when in fact we’re on the way down.

I’m pleased, of course, for the individual medal winners – especially Rebecca Adlington, who would probably have won a medal without any help from
the hateful Lottery. 

But their achievements are their own, not mine. It makes no difference to my life, or yours.

And how odd it is that all this effort, all this money and talent should have been devoted to succeeding in a contest which is, deep down, quite meaningless. 

Politicians of all the Liberal Elite parties join in praising the way it has been done. Yet if anyone advocates the same methods in our State education system – ruthless selection, encouragement of the best, harsh discipline, no tolerance of failure – he is dismissed by the same politicians as an ‘elitist’.

Well, excuse me, but isn’t it far more important that we survive as an economy and a society in this hard, competitive and increasingly merciless world than that we gain a few shiny knick-knacks in an athletics meeting? 

Let John Major, Michael Gove, Gordon Brown, Tessa Jowell and the rest of the supporters of comprehensive schools and diluted exams and socialised university entrance apply their principles to Britain’s 2012 Olympic team.

Your parents went to university? You’re rejected, so as to give an opportunity to someone who can’t swim as fast but needs encouragement.

You went to a private school? You’re rejected, too. We can’t have any privilege here, even if your parents bankrupted themselves to pay the fees. Your place will go to someone slower and less fit. 

You passed a tough test way ahead of the others? Sorry, you’ll just have to go at the speed of the slowest in a mixed-ability training squad. 

You’re talented but you live in a poor area? Too bad. All our best training schemes are in rich suburbs. 

Your training is constantly interrupted by bullying, swearing and loutish behaviour? Too bad. Here’s a copy of our ‘anti-bullying policy’. 

You’re doing really well? No help for you, then. Our concern is for equality, not excellence. 

You’re slow, undisciplined, disruptive and no good? Have a special trainer and lots of resources.

If we nurtured our Olympic hopefuls the way we educate our children, the only role they’d have in any Games would be sweeping up litter in the stadium. 

I have seldom seen a better example of an entire country getting its priorities wrong. 

The day will come, and quite soon, when we win no medals and realise what we have become.

But I suspect, by then, it will be too late.


I wish we were more like Russia

I remember the day in 1991 when the Kremlin stopped being a threat to Britain, a bright August morning in Moscow as the tanks withdrew from the end of my street, the Stalinist vigilantes packed up their little checkpoint in my block of flats and the KGB-sponsored putsch collapsed. 

The bins were full of torn-up and half-burned red and gold Communist Party cards. Communism was gone for ever. 

It has not come back. Private life, Christianity and family life returned and are (in some ways) now less threatened in Moscow than here in Britain. 

St Basil's Cathedral

Independent: Russia has come to stand for national sovereignty, while we give up our own

I had been a militant pro-Washington Cold Warrior. I had been despised and sneered at by much of my own fellow-travelling generation. 

They were specially nasty when I opposed communist infiltration in the unions, or attacked CND and pointed out that the nuclear threat to this country came from Soviet missiles, not from our own. 

I knew my enemy at home and abroad, inside-out. And from that 1991 day onwards, Russia was not my enemy any more, just a big European country that I was lucky to have lived in, puzzling, cruel and harsh in some ways, deeply touching in others. 

The German-dominated EU, it quickly emerged, was now a much more potent and urgent menace to British liberty and independence. 

I am baffled that so many conservative-minded people in Britain and America cannot see this simple point. 

They continue to rage about the alleged Russian menace, when Russia’s armed forces are a junk-shop of fizzing, flatulent scrap metal largely manned by corrupt drunkards, backed up by a fleet of half-sunk, rusting ships. 

They babble of a new Cold War, when communism – the whole issue of that war – is dead in Russia. 

But it has come to life again in Britain and America as political correctness, which is destroying all the things we fought the Cold War to save.

They fancy that the Western Left still has sympathy for Russia. I haven’t noticed it.


Russia, oddly enough, has come to stand for national sovereignty and independence, while we give up our own.

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Posted by Britannia Radio at 07:12