Thursday, June 28, 2007

Buried under the rubble of Beckton

Some people may be wondering why I am not writing about the new Cabinet. Basically I don't see the point, Iain, Guido and the Speccie Blog clearly have all that stuff covered, and frankly, I don't care that much (who am I kidding, Jacqui Smith as Home Secretary? Is he completely insane?). The thing is, whilst all this lovely "low skullduggery" is going on what about the other news? You know, the sort of stuff that gets, shall we say, "buried".

Well for a start, there is Tessa Jowell's parting news for James Purnell at the DCMS. Lovely old Jowelly agreed a new "memorandum of understanding" with Livingstone yesterday about the £675 million raid on the National Lottery to pay for the 2012 Olympics. Apparently the Government will be paying it all back. This is a good thing you might think. But the devil is always in the detail.

You see they are going to pay it back from the assumed profit they make after the games when they flog off all the assets. Things like the Olympic Village, the stadiums that sort of thing. So, in six years time or so the DCMS (assuming it still exists) has said it will pay back £675 million into the lottery fund. Sounds great, but there is no mention of inflation in the payback deal.

So yes, the DCMS has raided £675m, and the figure it will payback is £675m. The assumption it seems is that inflation will be, from now until then, 0%. Given we're talking about property sales though, where the inflation rate is way beyond the CPI, what we're actually talking about is a payback scheme that will, in effect, still be the equivalent of a raid on the lottery fund well above £100m whilst making it look like you're paying it all back.

Amazingly the former Culture Secretary said in her statement that the new deal should "give lottery distributors real confidence that the additional funding necessary for a successful Olympic and Paralympic Games will be re-paidproviding them and the whole country with a further 2012 dividend." What a load of bollocks.

But hey, who needs the arts?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like the same attention to detail she used on her Mortgage forms...

Anonymous said...

The lottery is Labours piggy bank ,I wonder how much they have removed from it since they took power,when it was proposed to have a lottery ,we heard that there would be sportsfields in every area for the kids ,86 mill for books ,600mil for the plastic top used for a few weeks ,then we get a religious leader saying because a guy won 19mill it was wrong ,since then the from what I can see it's 4mill on a Saturday and Wed it's 2mill ,I thought the idea of a lottery was to make people who had paid for a ticket rich not these thieves.

Guido Fawkes said...

Not going to do the re-shuffle - everyone else is...

Chris Paul said...

Who needs the arts? Well, not the Tories as far as I recall. It was Lady Thatcher herself as a humble missus who said:
"You know ... you don't have to fund artists because they will do their art anyway."

The Millennium Dome was a Tory project and the Lottery was a Tory project too?

On the property deals I'm not sure what the portfolio will be but some kinds of property - like public domain parks with covenants - depreciate rather than accumulate value.

They need maintained. They accrue no revenue.

What would the Tories have done? Not bid for the Games? Not related a lottery stream to the Games?

dizzy said...

Chris, what exactly is your point? Unless you actually believe that becaue I am a Tory I am responsible for something that happened over 15 years ago. Which is of course idiotic.

Anonymous said...

Is the answer to the nes that's been buried the complete wrongness about the Buckingham MP that you perpetuated yesterday?

dizzy said...

Who said anything about a Buckingham MP?

Anonymous said...

I heard Livingstone on LBC last week use the same financial footwork to pretend the lottery will get all the cash bad. I'm sure there is a secret 2012 spin course all these people go on,.