In my somewhat contrarian way, as Britain has been rejoicing over the success of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London, I’ve been thinking about how much more relevant the expenditure of all those billions might have been on a new “Festival of Britain”.
I remember so well the last one. It was in 1951 and was created in order to build the sense of recovery, economic and spiritual, in the aftermath of war.
Although it was centred on the south bank of the Thames (the Royal Festival Hall being its greatest surviving legacy), it reached out across the whole of Britain, embracing science, technology, design, innovation, architecture, the arts. It utilised the best people of that time and engaged the whole nation.
How much more relevant that would be now, in the hour of our economic distress (so similar in many ways to the post-war situation) - to give a clear sense of hope and the way forward, something which, for all its feel-good factors, the Olympic experience is not going to provide.
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