by Andrew Dismore MP

The 2008 Olympics ended with Britain’s greatest sporting success for a century — 19 gold medals and dozens of silvers and bronzes.

The excitement of almost overtaking sports superpower Russia to 3rd place in the table (a target for 2012!) amazed us all — except Barnet’s Conservatives. A leading Tory councillor wrote in a newspaper column last week that he “hates the Olympics”.

He ran down the achievement of sports people’s lifetime ambitions, as “highly paid athletes” who “left their consciences at passport control”.

No doubt we’ll see similar insults aimed at our courageous Paralympic athletes, soon to compete in their games — what a Tory send off.

While the nation revels in outstanding results, and acknowledges the personal sacrifices needed even just to make the Olympics Team GB without winning a medal, especially in less well funded minority sports, Barnet Conservatives simply can’t abide their achievements.

If it was just their dog-in-the-manger views, it would be bad enough. But this miserable approach infects the borough’s approach to sport, inoculating our young people not just against success at the highest level, but also denying them the chance to participate, enjoy and live healthy, active lives.

Conservative Barnet spends less per head on young people than anywhere else in the country. The administration refuses to allow the use of facilities like Pavilion Way fields — locked up to prevent kids even kicking a football on a sports field, now with uncut grass a metre high.

The Tories are also failing to capitalise on the huge opportunities the 2012 Olympics offer, to modernise the ageing sports facilities in Barnet.

When I hear from other MPs what their councils are doing to attract visiting competitor teams to use their facilities as training camps — with the investment this brings — and what they are doing to enthuse young people with the dreams of making the grade or with simply becoming more active, I am embarrassed by Barnet’s refusal to recognise these golden opportunities.

It is squandering the chance to improve community cohesion too — our many minority communities could link with the teams from their own ethnic heritage.

It used to appear as though the Tories were subliminally willing for the 2012 Olympics to fail for their own narrow party political reasons — now we know they openly are.

And the losers will be the people of Barnet, who are so badly served by anti-sport Conservative councillors. All Barnet will ever win for sporting achievement will be the local authorities’ wooden spoon — and with egg on its face, as it falls so far behind.

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