Ideas@TheCentre
Britain's Olympic fever
Most people in Britain think the Olympic Games opening ceremony, staged in London last Friday, was spectacularly successful in projecting ‘Britishness’ to the world. In place of the regimented pomp of Beijing, we had Mr Bean sending up Sir Simon Rattle as he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Queen leaving her corgis at Buck House to parachute into the stadium with James Bond.
Although I suspect millions of viewers in Vladivostok and Tianjin would have turned off their television sets in complete bewilderment, the home audience loved it. The ceremony created an idealised image of a country that is basically liberal, decent, creative and a bit whacky, and most Brits were happy to endorse this self-image. For one night, millions of us were genuinely proud to be British – there was a euphoria in the air that many Australians would have recognised from Sydney 2000. In a country that is often deeply cynical about its own virtues, this was exhilarating.
Danny Boyle, the socialist film director who put together the whole thing, has been widely feted, and rightly so. Yet there were two or three bits of the show that struck a deeply discordant note.
One was the celebration of the National Health Service (NHS). It’s not just that it’s odd to kick off a two-week celebration of peak human fitness with a massed display of sick beds, complete with dancing doctors and nurses. It’s also that this segment was obviously propagandist – and in a way even Beijing avoided.
Earlier that week, UK newspapers reported the death of 22-year-old Kane Gorny, who died of dehydration in a south London hospital after nurses repeatedly ignored his requests for water and failed to check his fluid levels. The wretched man even phoned the emergency number to summon police to the hospital, but they were sent away by the staff. This is just the latest in a succession of horrific stories of neglect and ill-treatment in NHS hospitals.
British people like to think the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’ (just as Russians used to like being told about their spectacular grain harvests). But nobody ever asks why, if it is so good, no other country has ever copied it. This chunk of the opening ceremony was painfully embarrassing because of what it revealed about Britain’s ignorance of much better health care systems elsewhere. It drew attention to how backward, deferential and insular Britain can be.
A second jarring note came with the entry of the Olympic flag, borne by eight people chosen personally by Boyle. It was an odd bunch, including the barrister who leads leftist pressure group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti. One couldn’t help feeling that most squaddies who have seen service fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan have done more to defend Olympic values than Chakrabarti, whose main battles have been fought in the studios of the BBC.
Finally, why did the segment celebrating British popular culture start with the 1960s? More than 1 in 10 Brits is aged 70 or more. Are they really now so marginal to our society that we can ignore the music and popular culture of their youth? Before they are wheeled away for the last time to their NHS wards, they might have appreciated a nod towards the Big Bands of the 1940s or the rock n’rollers of the ’50s. It didn’t all start with the Beatles.
Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
