Two events over the past week stand out as remarkable to me. The first has been the performance of Team GB at the Rio Olympics. Last week I wrote about the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics and how the performance of our team at the subsequent Olympics in Rio would be one measure of the London 2012 legacy. As I write on Sunday evening, we (population 65 million) have overtaken China (population 1.375 billion) to reach second place in the medals table.
This is an incredible achievement and hopefully we can maintain this position for the remainder of the Olympics and hold off China, which is a highly successful Olympic nation that can pick competitors from a population twenty times larger than ours.
While London 2012 has been a springboard for the further success at the Rio Olympics, we should look further back to see what helped to turn things around from the embarrassment of Atlanta 1996 when we finished 36th in the medals table with only one gold. The National Lottery set up by John Major’s Conservative Government of 1990 to 1997 changed everything, with long-term investment in training our most talented athletes and the facilities needed being provided. Two decades on, we are clearly seeing the benefits of lottery funding in British sport.
The other notable event this week is the new depths being sunk to in the ongoing civil war in the Labour Party. It is absolutely incredible that the courts have been used twice to intervene in a leadership contest in a major British political party. That should never happen and but then how else can their members react when Labour show contempt for democracy and fairness, by suddenly changing the rules during a leadership contest by not allowing 130,000 members a leadership vote?
Compounding this is the staggering public war of words between Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn and Deputy Leader Tom Watson. It feels quite surreal for the Deputy to publicly accuse the Leader over ‘Trotsky entryists’ and the Leader’s response being that he is talking “nonsense”. I suspect this will run and run.