Something’s rotten in the city of London

“The piss on the poles is not canine
The red in the spit not blood,
Be not deceived by this city of mine,
Of smells and garbage and flood.”
From Bombay Nightmares by Bachchoo

Dear Ken Livingstone, You are the Labour Party’s nominee for the London mayoral election of May 3, 2012, when you’ll battle the present Conservative mayor Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick, a former police officer who will stand for the Liberal Democrats.

The London Olympics 2012 will be held two months after that. The mayor’s office is very much involved in the Olympics as the building of infrastructure and handling of transport, policing, tourism, several aspects of hospitality and spectacle are the responsibility of the city. Boris in his floppy, flaxen-haired, fumblingly-flamboyant way has been fully involved in all these with the Olympic Committee and the ministers of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition who inherited responsibility from the Blair Labour government who won the bid for London.
He has at the same time used the forthcoming games as a platform. There was the trip to Beijing on economy class and then the mayoral duties to do with lighting the flame that is circling the world and other ceremonials which crank up the excitement towards the international event. He has also mayorally countered criticism in the press about the shortcomings of the ticketing process, the perception that the games have been mortgaged to corporates and lobbyists at the expense of the ordinary Londoner whose taxes and rates are paying for the whole damn shoot.
Or maybe not the whole damn shoot. Part of the damn shoot is being paid for by sponsors. These are companies who wish to use the games, an international platform, to advertise their goods or virtues and have coughed up millions of pounds for the privilege. Boris, much in favour of bankers, corporates, private sector investment and capitalism has welcomed each of these contributions with fulsome official gratitude. Sponsorship exchanges something unquantifiable for very quantifiable relief of the cost to the taxpayer. One such contribution is from a company called Dow Chemicals.
It will supply what the Olympic Committee is calling a “sustainable wrap”. The Olympic stadium is circular and its topmost outer rim protrudes as a larger sloping cylinder above the smaller circular base. It’s like a saucer, in effect. This “wrap” will consist of long polythene isosceles hangings from the rim, like a continuous circle of stalactites.
Your rival and opponent Boris has this to say about the wrap: “This will provide the final grand touch to the magnificent stadium, which has already become an icon of the 2012 Games, transforming the east London landscape forever.” Boris has tastefully avoided using the ugly and meaningless adjective “sustainable” to describe the frill. Others have not.
George Hamilton, vice-president of Dow Olympic Operations, said the company is committed to finding a sustainable post-games use for the wrap and is investigating several options. “Our goal is to provide solutions that help make the Olympic Games more sustainable, safer, and that will help improve performance,” said Hamilton. “We’re providing this wrap as a sustainable solution for the Games.” So the wrap will help athletes run faster? He goes on, addicted to the adjective. “We are proud that the wrap will have a lasting and sustainable legacy, and one that will improve quality of life long after the closing ceremonies.” It will make the lame walk and the blind see?
There’s more of this tosh and there’s a reason for quoting it: “Dow has a strong commitment to sustainability,” said Keith Wiggins, Dow UK managing director. “This commitment and our focus on innovation and scientific excellence are behind every stitch of the wrap. We’re proud that the wrap will be in compliance with the London Olympic Sustainability Source Code. We recognise the global importance of the Olympic Games and of the work we do in addressing global challenges through chemistry.”
Oh really?
Here comes the crux, dear Ken. Twenty-one Indian athletes and several charitable organisations in India have joined in an appeal to the London Olympic Committee to refuse this sponsorship from Dow Chemicals because this company bought, in 2001, another called Union Carbide.
Union Carbide operated a plant in the 1980s in the central Indian city of Bhopal. On a night in 1984, owing to criminally faulty storage arrangements and grossly neglected maintenance of pipes and valves, tonnes of poisonous methyl-isocyanate gas leaked out of the plant, formed a cloud over the city and killed an estimated 10,000 people. Thousands of others were maimed. The American executives, some say with the connivance of the then Indian government, left for the US, refusing to face consequences or charges.
Union Carbide did nothing to clean up the poisoned ground water and the toxic contamination of the soil, which still affects the population living there.
Dow Chemicals denies any liability for what the company they bought did in Bhopal. It maintains that it never owned or operated the Bhopal plant and that legal claims regarding the gas leak were resolved when Union Carbide paid $470 million as compensation for those killed or injured. The Indian government is seeking an additional $1.7 billion for the victims.
Some loophole in international law or pure capitalist defiance contributed to Dow’s “sustainable” claim — to not clean up the mess their subsidiary left. They bought the assets of Carbide to sustain themselves, not the victims of its crime. Boris seems happy with Dow but I know, being one of them, that no voter of Indian or even Asian origin will endorse his welcoming of Dow’s wrap. His stance is enough to tip my mayoral vote elsewhere. Dow’s hypocrisy is staggering. Between the election and the Olympics there are 60 days. A new mayor could tear down the “wrap” or allow us Londoners to non-violently demonstrate against it. Come on Ken, I’m offering you a (sustainable?) bandwagon. Hop on, or push!
Yours democratically, FD.