The list of things that are open to criticism — and worse — about the Olympics is a long one. We all have our own special beefs. Mine include the current obsession with “British interests” at the expense of foreign excellence, and the pathetic press clamour for knighthoods and damehoods for favoured medal winners. But there are plenty more.
Part of me could scarce forebear to cheer. Yes, the Olympics are too inflated, too nationalistic, too full of hypocrisies about drugs and corruption and some of the coverage is infantalising. A single look at the picture of the five-year-old Omran Daqneesh in that ambulance in Aleppo puts all the hyperbole into perspective. But the fact remains that Britain has been doing well, not because Britons are best, but for a crunchy material reason called money. That reason should not be dismissed. On the contrary, it should be respected and celebrated — because all those medals have come as a direct result of a British government decision to prioritise and invest in elite sport.
Admittedly, it is a fair bet that someone as brilliant as Mo Farah possesses the sheer talent to ensure that he would have won his medals in any Olympic year, even without help from the taxpayer. But that isn’t true of all the 50-plus British medal winners who have prospered in Rio. Success in cycling is fundamentally down to dosh as much as dash. Ditto with gymnastics. Britain’s swimmers have done well this year because swimming was deemed to have underperformed in 2012 and was given special priority this time.
There is no mystery about any of this. As Rio 2016 has unfolded, the name of John Major has crept back into the news, exactly as it did during London 2012, and for the same good reason. Faced with a dismal United Kingdom performance at the Atlanta Games of 1996, during his premiership, the sports-loving Major insisted that lottery funding should be targeted on doing better next time. London and Rio have been the harvest of that seed. Some will say that all this is a huge waste of money. Sure, there is a case to make for that. Others will say it would be better spent elsewhere.
On a day when childhood obesity is again in the news, it’s obvious that sports facilities for the many are at least as much of a priority as handouts for the elite few. But the two are not inherently incompatible, especially in a prosperous country like Britain. Beware the tedious old trap of making the best the enemy of the good. The truth is that the Olympics is good national value. Putting £350 million (Dh1.68 billion) into winning medals once every four years may sound a lot, but it’s a tiny proportion of the total public spending over the same period. Feeling good about Britain as a nation because of sport seems money pretty well spent to me. If part of that feel-good factor is that Britons embrace people with disabilities more readily because of the Paralympics, or that people of all backgrounds feel included in a British nation that is good at all these things, then that is, as they say, priceless.
If government can invest intelligently in elite sport, why should it not do the same thing with other public goods too? Moreover, there is a much larger lesson from all this. In the end, elite sport is just a highly specialised industry. Yet, in both principle and in practice, what is true of sports applies just as much to many other areas of industry. This ought not to be a difficult stretch. Many industries get financial support from the government, though the government is not often keen to advertise the fact. Everything from the arms industry to the arts, from graphene to the garden bridge, is underpinned by the public purse. It is hard to imagine where agriculture, steel or banking would be without public subsidy. Taxpayer funds support them all, just as they support Laura Trott and Jason Kenny.
Nevertheless, the idea that government should be involved in “picking winners” was one of the principal ideological casualties of the Margaret Thatcher era, and has only been very tentatively rehabilitated at any point during the past 35 years — Michael Heseltine, Peter Mandelson and Vince Cable all tried. But picking winners in industrial policy can be first cousin to backing losers. Post-war government spending on many parts of heavy industry was as often triggered by those industries’ decline as by any possibility of expansion.
Public money is precious. Raising more of it is politically difficult, especially if the economy contracts. So it is important, as with the Olympics, not to be sentimental. That’s why those whose vision of industrial strategy begins and ends with nationalisation are as much a menace to good policy as the Thatcherites were with their reflexive hatred of any state spending.
The last thing that Britain needs is taxpayers propping up industries with no future. That’s as bad as ensuring no industry has a future by insisting on spending nothing at all. Yet, if the British economy is ever to be rebalanced away from its overdependence on financial services, the nettle has to be grasped. If Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech in Birmingham last month is to be believed, she is a supporter of something she described as “a proper industrial strategy”. In that speech, May said that workers, local communities and even sometimes the whole country have a stake in the development and the defence of successful companies. Government should be able to step in to defend key sectors, she said. That is one way of reading May’s pausing of the Hinkley and Sizewell nuclear power deals. It is also getting close to a strategy of supporting winners. Let’s hope so.
For a prime minister to talk about industrial strategy as a principle is certainly refreshing. Perhaps talk is all that it will ultimately prove to be. May and her new business secretary, Greg Clark, will need to get serious about the industries that Britain can’t do without and those it needs to develop once politics resumes in the autumn. But they could hardly have a more pressing incentive. In the post-Brexit world, they may have little alternative.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as on media, law and music.
