I will start this by admitting I have never been a supporter of the London Olympics. I thought that £2.37 billion was an obscene amount to be spending in the first place. With so much suffering, poverty, starvation and disease in the world I can't justify that kind of spend in my mind. I also resent that London once again gets the focus and the rest of the country is left to pay for their benefits.
So hearing Tessa Jowell explain that the spend had now rocketed to £9.3 billion does not please me. In my job I have to manage budgets (obviously not this amount, in fact not too much at all in the grand scheme of things, about 0.5% of our turnover) but if I go over budget by £100 then questions are asked. Yet our esteemed leaders can quadruple a budget without a blink and expect us to blithely accept it. Tessa explains this mild deviation in budget plans by saying that the original estimate was merely a "funding pitch". I am not exactly sure what a vacuous statement like that is supposed to mean but I think it means that the government once again manipulated statistics to make something look more attractive than it really was in the belief that we couldn't turn back once the decision was made. Feed the public misinformation and lead them where we want them to go seems to be a general principle of this government. I have said before, I don't mind paying taxes, what I mind is the taxes being mis-spent.
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