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Written by Dr Eamonn Butler
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Saturday, 29 December 2007 02:03 |
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My true love sent to me: five gold rings. It probably means the first five books of the Old Testament, but to me five rings means the Olympics, which are coming to London in 2012.
Well, they say that. But it's a typical government-led project, so who knows? The London bid for the games put the cost at £3,375m, but in March this year Tessa Jowell revealed that the cost had risen to £9,300m - a tripling of the costs in just a few months. Something of a black hole, which the hole-vaulting Culture Secretary explained as due to VAT, inflation, and a whopping £2,700m 'just in case things go wrong' fund (a figure larger than that the original estimate for building the entire Olympic Park. As the bulldozers move in, it cannot give much confidence to their operators that the costs of all this, including their wages, are still being calculated.
The Scottish Parliament building started with an estimate of £40m and ended up costing £400m. Still, we taxpayers can afford it, can't we?
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