Dispatched from a rain-sodden holiday destination somewhere in England.

Like many I’ve just finished watching the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

From a Chinese point of view it was quite brilliant and everything went spectacularly to plan in that Great Hall of the People style they prefer.

However, looked at from a London 2012 perspective it confirmed my worst fears that this “show” will be a total disaster and will demean our country for years.

The eight-minute segment devoted to the 2012 Olympics reminded me of BBC children’s television on speed. Crammed with flashing graphics, wildly gesticulating, politically-correct people throwing newspapers into the “street,” a very inappropriate red bus, a weird reference to the shipping forecast, and David Beckham (groan) … need I go on?

Football and rock music are all we have to show for 2000 years of titanic struggle against the forces of darkness, it seems.

Where was the greatness and dignity of London pre-Blair? The spirit of the city that carried it through two World Wars and the turbulence of two millennia of history. Why has infantilism become the central characteristic of a capital sorely despoiled in recent years?

It hit all the wrong buttons and was clearly the product of Red Ken Livingstone’s Cuban regime, rather than the new Mayor’s.

If this is a foretaste of what is to come, many of us will boycott these Games as totally misrepresenting our country and capital city.

It makes it harder to defend the integrity of London because New Labour has turned it into the stab capital of the world. As such it does not represent anything that the huge silent majority in these islands can defend or support.

Even the country — Great Britain — has been mangled into Eurotrash-speak as “Team GB”. Only one brave newscaster on the BBC News Channel — Chris Lowe — had the grace to say, “Team Great Britain”. He might have improved on that by referring to “the Great Britain team,” but we have to be thankful for small mercies nowadays.

These are quick thoughts and impressions of what we saw today from Beijing. I am certain that Syntagma’s more considered view will be even more damning.

Well, that’s the Olympics over for another four years.

What! I hear you say, it’s only just starting? Are you having a laugh?

In modern times, the opening ceremony has become the Olympic Games. The rest is substandard minority sports played out by complete unknowns on behalf of various pharmaceutical companies.

A few score cyclists riding round and round a velodrome — how many know what a velodrome is? The Tour de France is a much greater spectacle.

Meanwhile, half a hundred rowers pull their way down a canal in a park. I don’t think I can stifle this yawn for much longer.

And all those athletes running round a track in pursuit of the big advertising contacts a gold medal will bring. Everyone wants to be a model these days. Whatever happened to real men?

For this, China has turned its capital Beijing into an armed camp, ringed by their version of Patriot missiles, just in case someone somewhere tries to disrupt the event. They have, but it’s in Georgia and it’s the Russians.

I have to admit though, the opening ceremony was without doubt the greatest show ever put on anywhere on the planet at any time. It wasn’t the most tinglingly enjoyable, like a big Royal event in London, but it had more Wow factor than any other comparable bash. It was massive, unremitting — it lasted four hours — and had a machine-like precision that was quite mesmerising.

Pity poor London which has to match that in just four years from now. Can a capital city every bit as ancient as the former Peking dust off its old bones and produce a show as scintillating as the new Emperors of the Middle Kingdom have done?

That is to miss the point entirely. Britain is not a command State like China. The English don’t go in for that kind of mass synchronized eventing. Anyone who has watched our football team knows how unsynchronized we can be.

We’re a nation of individualists who rather resent being pushed around by our rulers. Besides, we are more than a little ironic and prefer our patriotism laced with a great deal of humour. Think Gilbert and Sullivan and you’re on the page.

The problem London has is that its Olympics is in the hands of the same team that brought you the Millennium Dome, the Great Wall of Fire across the Thames that fizzled out like a damp squib, the Millennium Bridge that wobbled so much people were seasick crossing it, and a display meant to highlight 2000 years of British history that included a troupe of Brazilian dancers, snowboarding, an Irish presenter, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Way too much irony!

I refer, of course, to those prize Charlies, New Labour.

Tessa Jowell is the Olympics Minister. This is a lady who has been Minister for “Fun” for donkeys’ years and was demoted to her present position a year ago. She has never run anything in her entire life apart from bits of bureaucratic machinery. Naturally, the cost of Olympic contracts is rising by the week.

Her husband was allegedly involved in bribery scandals with the Italian Prime Minister, and such was the fuss, Tessa had to separate from him, while denying all knowledge of his activities.

Thankfully, London now has a real showman as its Mayor, one Boris Johnson, a chap who knows a thing or two about irony and has actually appeared on game shows. We should also have a different government in 2010, when David Cameron is almost certain to be Prime Minister — he’s 25 percent ahead in the key marginal seats.

Perhaps the most important point is that London can’t be taken over in the way that Beijing has. It’s essentially hundreds of small villages where the old fields in between have been built up over centuries. Many boroughs retain their villagey character. The Olympics will practically disappear when plonked down in that rather dismal part of London hollowed out for the even more depressing stadiums and fun arenas. Like the Dome, there will be no sign of it anywhere that tourists actually go.

I would like to be able to summon up more enthusiasm for this project than I can, but the Olympic Games has become a crashing bore. Only a bigger and more spectacular opening ceremony each time masks the fact that the sport is a sham and the nuts and bolts rusted beyond repair.

The irony is, London is just not capable of that kind of opening show. Amid the disappointment, we may finally realize that this overblown extravaganza is simply not worth disrupting our lives for.

Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham’s Embalmed Body

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

Stable Families
We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this would have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

As General George Patton once said : “Don’t tell people how to do things, [suggest] what to do and let them surprise you with the result.”

Thanks to Aaron Brazell at Technosailor for the Patton quotation.

According to the new issue of New York magazine, which is a homage to London in the 21st century, the financial, cultural and culinary aspects of the UK capital now tower over New York.

The magazine says : “If Paris was the capital of the 19th century and New York of the 20th, London is shaping up to be the capital of the 21st century. It is not Britain and the US that have a special relationship, it is London and New York… increasingly it seems as though London has the upper hand.”

Certainly the City — London’s world-class financial centre — is much more vibrant than Wall Street, which is suffering the dead hand of Sarbanes-Oxley regulation. The light-touch, principle-based system of the Square Mile knocks spots off New York’s draconian regime. This, almost alone, allowed the London Stock Exchange to survive a ferocious takeover bid from New York’s Nasdaq recently, simply by pointing out to shareholders that it was in a much better financial position than the American exchange. No sweat.

That kind of insouciance can’t be bought, only built. Very English.

As for culture, well, London has it all. I must admit I wish it had a little more familiarity at times — I lived in London for five years a while back — but you can’t have everything.

Syntagma has been planning a major network magazine around London for a long time. Writers, authors, bloggers, investors, or any interested parties, please get in touch. Contact details are in the footer.

Update : Not forgetting the Olympic Games are set for London in 2012. Yet another reason for paying attention to this remarkable metropolis (it’s a collection of cities rather than one big one).