WHEN you’re in an argument with someone, there are two clear signs that they’re losing. The first is when they resort to abuse – and the second is when they have to distort your case to buttress their own.
In their battle to knock down Greenwich Market, Nick Raynsford MP, the Greenwich Society and the forces of development did both those things – and did, indeed, lose. So it’s rather encouraging to see them reprising exactly the same tactics over the Greenwich Park Olympics.
In an article for this website last week, Mr Raynsford accused Nogoe, the anti-Olympics group, of “scaremongering” and a “complete misrepresentation of the facts.” His evidence? A poster they issued, with a picture of the open area in front of the National Maritime Museum, and beneath it the statement that “this will be a no go area in 2012 for several months.”
It is actually Mr Raynsford who is distorting the facts here. As last week’s planning application confirms, the area depicted in Nogoe’s poster will indeed be closed – for eight months.
Mr Raynsford attacks Nogoe for “continuing to perpetuate the myth that the park would be closed in a BBC report in October this year, when a spokeswoman said it would be ‘socially and morally wrong’ for the park to be closed, despite knowing that this would not be the case.”
The actual BBC report quotes Nogoe’s spokeswoman as saying that it would be socially and morally wrong to close the park during the games. And as last week’s planning application confirms, it will indeed be closed during the games.
The outline facts of the Park’s closure are actually quite uncontested. They have been established everywhere outside the mind of Nick Raynsford for more than a year now. And what the further details published last week show is that, far from “scaremongering,” Nogoe have significantly understated the problems the Olympics will cause.
Forty-two thousand vehicle movements in the park, including more than 6,000 lorry movements; five years of works, starting next spring; the park sliced up with fences for most if not all of that time; full restoration of the park only in 2015. And the more I pore through the planning documents, the more horrors emerge – details to follow.
What other distortions have the pro-Games forces been guilty of? Mr Raynsford describes one survey showing an improbable 85% support for the Games as “independent polling.” Actually, it was a voodoo poll. It was market research, not done to the standards of a professional opinion pollster. It was carried out for Locog, and it was packed with questions so comically loaded that 85% must in fact have been a very disappointing result.
Locog, in another of last week’s ripostes, claimed that “all work related to the Games will be completed by November 2012,” other than the acid grass restoration programme by 2015. Not true: the “amenity grassland” across much of the park will be fenced off until spring 2013.
They also say that the extent of tree pruning will be “minimal” and “routine.” I think the trees which will suffer a “removal of branches to the main stem” might quarrel with that.
In this debate and others Nick Raynsford, in particular, is in danger of becoming ridiculous. Not long ago, he was quoted as saying that he had “no doubt” that the redevelopment of Greenwich Market would succeed on appeal and would be built. The proposal was in breach of so many council and Government planning policies, and its rejection by councillors was so comprehensive, that it in fact seems rather unlikely to win an appeal, or to be built in its current form.
Economics have also turned against the development. At the same meeting that councillors refused the market redevelopment, centred around a huge new hotel, they approved a large new hotel on Greenwich High Road. They’re also currently considering another hotel proposal – the conversion of the upper floors of the Trafalgar pub. So any new hotel in the market now faces even greater challenges to its commercial viability.
Mr Raynsford’s instinct for distortion was also on hand over the market, with a claim that opponents had said Turnpin Lane would be destroyed. Nobody had said anything of the sort, of course. In psychoanalysis, this sort of behaviour is known as “Freudian projection” – when you project on to others the faults and flaws you sense in yourself.
Mr Raynsford may be able to inhabit his own private fantasy world for the majority of the parliamentary term. But with no more than six months before he must face his voters, it seems a rather unwise place for him to be at the moment.
Is that the same Nick Raynsford your old mate Boris Johnson thinks is just the chap to help build his airport in the estuary, or a different one?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/23/boris-johnson-thames-airport
“And the more I pore through the planning documents, the more horrors emerge”
My sentiments exactly. The plan to use Greenwich Park for the Olympics 2012 equestrian events was always a bad idea but the planning application illustrates in horrible detail why it will be a disaster.
One direct effect of the insecticides, excavations and earth removals, construction of a massive 23,000-seat stadium, thousands and thousands of heavy vehicle movements, noise, flood-lighting, “pruning”, and almost every square inch that is not cross-country course covered in “logistics” things – like vets, doping checks, media facilities, security centres, staff support – is that the entire natural food-chain in the Park will collapse.
A delicately balanced eco-system that has evolved over hundreds of years will be erased by the preparations for an elite sport that lasts about four weeks. Entire species will be wiped out from their strongholds in the Park. LOCOG has been assiduous in making sure that its bat survey of 2009 contains no data about juvenile bats and bat roosts in the summer of 2009; so if no bat roosts are found in the summers of 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 … LOCOG will claim that that is because there weren’t any in 2009, not because LOCOG broke the laws that protect bats.
I want the Royal Parks to explain why they have connived at this plan for desolation. The year 2009 was the Royal Park’s “adopt a stag beetle” year, yet they did not even bother to conduct an up to date survey of the stag beetle in Greenwich Park in 2009 – and LOCOG did not, either. Cue nil stag beetles – another protected and globally threatened species – from 2010 onwards. But LOCOG will be able to claim that the Olympics had nothing to do with it.
If Greenwich Park is not to become The Silent Park in 2012 (or before), the venue for the equestrian events has to be switched to Windsor (say).
Oh, and, Tom, go and find a web site about the Thames Estuary. What relevance is your comment here?
I found Nick Raynsford really helpful when it came to getting EU funds for the redevelopment of Woolwich Arsenal, but his attitude on the equestrian Olympics is, well, a load of horseshit. It is as if he has been replaced by an evil twin.
“What relevance is your comment here?”
Plenty, since by attacking him Gilligan is yet again demonstrating his inherent inconsistency – clue: having Gilligan on your side is a flag to the rest of London that you don’t have a case, generally, since he generally picks lost and pointless causes.
Lost causes like the defeat of Ken Livingstone, Tom?
Nick Raynsford was also one of the few South London Labour MPs who had guts to vote against LHR expansion. Unfortunately, many others didn’t and millions of Londoners will suffer when the expansion eventually goes ahead.
But I agree that Raynsford has lost his marbles with the Olympics and I’m very disappointd that he has resorted to dirty tactics. This makes me question if he is really trying to do the best for his constituents or if he just wants to shine in the front row of the giant stadium (alongside council leaders) in 2012 and chooses to ignore the pain that his moments of glory will cause to ordinary people for years.
I am a great fan of the Equestrain Olympics coming to Greenwich Village, World Heritage site.
@P Hill (Greenwich Holiday Lets), you might want to read what the experts – the European Tour Operators Association, no less – say about the alleged benefits to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games:
“there appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games, and considerable evidence of damage.”
See the three reports downloadable here
More on this myth.
Christopher Rodrigues, chairman of VisitBritain, admitted in an interview in India’s Economic Times (July 2009) that 2012 Olympics would drive tourists away from London. He said,
“The major impact of the Olympics on tourism in the UK is going to be on other places, because many people tend to avoid the city because of all the Games hype”
See, too, the comment below that article,
“Tom Jenkins, executive director of the ETOA, argued that the tourism benefit of staging the Olympics was something of a myth, saying that the effect of staging a large sports event is to scare regular visitors away from host cities, not just during the events themselves but in the months leading up to them.
‘The principal problem is the impression that everything will be overcrowded and overpriced and this blights a region,’Mr Jenkins said.”
I agree with Tom, Andrew is unable to be balanced in his reporting and therefore any campaign suffers from his support. If the market vote had been after the council election do you think you would have had the same result? probably not, so the issue is has the campaign ‘saved’ the market or merely delayed the regeneration.
The ninth paragraph of Andrew’s article makes a distinction between public opinion polling and market research: the techniques are in fact the same. Nevertheless the survey, though carried out by Nielsen – a well known research company – was clearly biassed. Before making a formal complaint to the Market Research Society I asked LOCOG for a copy of the actual questionnaire so as to have the full picture but the Community Consultation Manager has told me “that it is not LOCOG policy to release research questionnaires to 3rd parties”. What do they have to hide?
So the complaint will be made on the basis of the summary which appears in Appendix 18 of section 3.27 of the Planning Application.