Soon this glorious summer of medals will turn into a winter of three discontents – no growth except in poverty, cuts in public services that will bite, and poisonous politics as Tories and Lib Dems bicker while Boris plans Dave’s ousting.
There is Team GB everywhere except where we it need most – in the cabinet room, Whitehall corridors, and boardrooms of Britain.
The Olympics have been good for national morale but will they be good for changing the way we organise ourselves? Tory politicians and commentators have tried to claim all credit for their tribe even if Dave seemed a bit of a Jonah early on. Boris looked a twit suspended in mid-air and Jeremy took Citizen Kane to the show.
In fact the Games were won by, whisper it not, Tony Blair in 2005. Tessa Jowell and Richard Caborn steered the Games over the subsequent five years and much of the preparation and investment and choice of people like Seb Coe as leaders were Labour decisions.
Boring naysayers like Simon Jenkins have been proved wrong as London and Britain have taken the Games to their heart, helped by the astonishing sporting achievements. The tone was set by the Labour party political broadcast Danny Boyle produced for the opening with help from Mr Bean, the Queen and James Bond. It was denounced by one of Cameron’s bright young Tory MPs as ‘leftwing multicultural claptrap’. Quite.
Can Team GB be transformed into Team UK with a political programme that can renew our country? If so it will have to be based on the following 10 principles:
1. The idea of teamwork. For the first time in its history Labour is well into opposition without ideological splits or personality politics like in the 1950s or 1980.
2. Significant public investment. Whether via the Lottery or directly from DCMS the public realm have put the money up. Britain will not do well if we expect private interest to be patriotic.
3. Team UK must copy Team GB and focus on working much harder than we do now, constant attention to detail, and seeking continuous improvement. Team GB lags behind China in medals and Team UK will not compete globally unless hard work, around the clock, at weekends, becomes the norm.
4. Can we drop the cliché that you can’t pick winners? That is exactly what has been showed to work. Some fell by the wayside, some didn’t do it on the day, but if we left British Olympic hopes to the market we wouldn’t have a single medal.
5. The regions and poor areas of London were made part of the story. The decision to make the Olympics a Labour story of redeveloping poor areas of east London won the Games. The athletes have come from all over Britain including Paul Goodison who started sailing on a Rotherham reservoir. Scotland and Northern Ireland produced medal winners as well. The Games were in London but Labour must speak for Team Nation not just the city.
6. Immigrant Brits including very recent ones won medals. UKIP, the BNP and Migration Watch had to button their lips as the nation cheered our champions no matter where they were born or the colour of their skin. A quarter of Team GB Olympians were born outside the UK. Team UK will not be built by dumping on all who have come to live, study and work here even if born abroad. Labour was right not to slam the door in the face of hard-working incomers and the Tories are wrong to starve Britain of talent and hard work from foreigners.
7. A fully unionised multi-nation workforce brought the magnificent stadiums and other infrastructure to completion well in time. Team UK must build on social partnership and dump the ‘them and us’ loathing of workers and unions that we get from Tory MPs.
8. Everyone played by same rules at the Games. Team UK will not work if, like the Tories, we pretend we can have our own rules different from those followed by our partners in the EU.
9. Cameron asked Labour politicians to take part in helping welcome the many foreign VIPs – ministers and business leaders – that came to Britain. Team UK cannot be the exclusive possession of one party. Labour has to build coalition politics in the broad sense now to show that a Team UK under Labour leadership will be an inclusive project.
10. Team UK will not be able to rest on the laurels being won by Team GB. Athens in 2004 used the Olympic Games to renew the city and did so with success. But thereafter a corrupt political class continued their bad old ways with disastrous results for Greece a few years later. Right now the economics of George Osborne, the isolationism of William Hague and the indifference to the poor and to the public sector of David Cameron are leading Britain in the wrong direction.
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Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham. Follow on @denismacshane and www.denismacshane.com
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Photo: Department for Culture, Media and Sport