These are going to be a fantastic Games and amazing festival of sporting expression and achievement, and everybody who thinks that they’ve had enough sport already or that they’ve reached satiety are [sic] wrong.
London Mayor Boris Johnson, 28 August 2012
Haven’t you heard? The Paralympics have been cancelled because Atos have ruled that the athletes are not disabled after all.
Online joke
The Paralympic Games are to conclude this evening with a “Festival of Flame” grandiloquently aimed, in the view of its artistic director Kim Gavin, at no less exalted a task than paying “tribute to the human spirit.” Soporific pop group Coldplay are to be the main musical draw and, it is advertised, will play an “unusual setlist” (which presumably does not mean that they will be essaying an hour of atonal free improvisation). An appositely ceremonious ambiance is to be reinforced by military personnel unveiling the Union Flag to the strains of the national anthem. At the end of what one might call, in a blasphemous puncturing of the reverential public mood, the via dollarosa of an Olympic summer, we are consequently able to take stock. The putative success, but actual disaster, of the main event has already been addressed – see the entries for 12 and 16 August – and there is less reason than ever for revising those earlier judgements. We might just note in passing that Neil Woodford, investment manager at Invesco Perpetual, which owns 5% of G4S shares, has declared that the criticism dished out by a parliamentary select committee to G4S chief executive Nick Buckles, mild though it was, was akin to witnessing “a medieval persecution” and might influence businesses to quit the UK. One lives in hope. It now remains to examine to what extent we can take seriously the BBC’s claim that “the London 2012 feelgood factor lives on” in the shape of the Paralympic Games, and whether in fact those Games, as is commonly assumed, have advanced the cause of disabled people. Tomorrow’s Olympic victory parade, in the words of Boris Johnson’s overheated oratory, “will sweep through central London in a glorious miasma of colour, noise and excitement.” (Despite his expensive private education, Johnson appears ignorant as to the meaning of “miasma” – the online Wiktionary defines it as a “noxious atmosphere.” Or perhaps he is merely guilty of a Freudian slip.) The parade will seek to persuade us that the Games have been an unqualified boon for Britain’s disabled community, and for the UK in general. The truth, however, may be somewhat less rosy.
The Marxism of the present author, Mark Conlon, is sufficiently vulgar for me to look upon sport as a superstructural reflection of the economic base from which it springs. Hence sport, in a capitalist social formation, will reflect the cut-throat individualism of its socioeconomic setting. I do not believe that such self-centered individualism – characterized by Alan Sillitoe, writing of Olympians’ refusal to abandon the 1972 Munich Olympics after the murder of eleven Israeli participants, as “athletes who are in the grip of their physical investment at the expense of all human feeling” – is the best means to combat disabled persons’ oppression. On the contrary, their salvation can lie only in solidarity and collective action. The London Paralympics have provided an instructive illustration of the cul-de-sac of individualist strategies: an unseemly spat between two sprinters (it would be kinder not to name them) who, rather than recognizing their solidarity as disabled men, preferred to engage in an absurd feud over whether the longer prosthetic legs worn by one conferred an unfair advantage by comparison with the other’s more modestly proportioned artificial limbs. A legitimate impulse to celebrate disabled people’s achievements should not inhibit us from arguing that there are better avenues of achievement than that of sport, the nature of which is frequently dull, puerile and repetitious, not to mention fatally vitiated by the corrupting effect of money. Moreover, in societies such as the UK where secularism has traction, it is apparent that to a considerable degree sport has superseded religion as the opium of the people – for a section of its adherents, it meets theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of religion as a preoccupation of supreme concern – and it is uncomfortable to think of the disabled working to strengthen this new species of panem et circences distraction.
It is evident that Paralympians have blundered into a political trap set for them by the Cameron-Clegg coalition government, namely to act as a “deserving” minority of disabled persons whose go-getting enterprise can expose the recalcitrant ressentiment of an “undeserving” majority still wedded to the unreasonable idea that the state should provide them with a minimum level of support. It may be that David Cameron and his band of Tory shysters actually do like the tiny elite of Paralympian athletes, and that the Prime Minister’s lauding of them at the Paralympic torch ceremony, together with the hoisting of the Paralympic flag over 10 Downing Street, were not simply manifestations of bourgeois politicians’ limitless capacity for hypocrisy. What is beyond doubt is that the Conservative Party despises the great mass of disabled people who lack a Paralympian flair for ramping up jingoistic delirium, and who need to learn that the neoliberal state is one fanatically devoted to the welfare of corporations and finance capital, but certainly not in any way to theirs. In a similar vein, Tory mouthpiece the Daily Mail, a rag whose speciality since its fascistic heyday in the 1930s has been the journalistic vituperation of vulnerable minorities, hails British Paralympic medallists as “our golden wonders” while simultaneously railing against benefit scroungers (which, parsing Mail-speak, translates as benefit claimants tout court).
At the Pathways group meeting on 4 September, Dave Sweetsur pointed out to us the resemblance, which is hardly accidental, between David Cameron’s rhetoric on the Paralympics (the events emphasizing what Paralympians are able to do in spite of their disabilities) and the modus operandi of his Atos Healthcare-administered welfare legislation, according to which, in determining fitness for work, a disabled person’s ability to press a button is of greater import than the fact that he or she may possess no more than a single serviceable finger with which to do so. Thus British Paralympians, tragically and unwittingly, furnish ideological ammunition for capitalism’s rage at those whose health is too fragile for them to be fully integrated into the drive for capital accumulation, the inefficient human “factors of production” unable to commit themselves to lives unswervingly dictated by the rigours of capitalist work-discipline. The latter are a blight on the smooth functioning of neoliberalism, “a useless number in the accounts of big capital” (to quote one of the Zapatistas, Major Ana Maria). If, nonetheless, they can be hounded for a period of time into some form of drudgery, then at least a modicum of surplus value can be extracted from them before they fall by the wayside, an outcome which capitalists judge to be infinitely preferable to their taxes (when they deign to pay them) being diverted to the upkeep of such non-productive drones. And if their supposed lack of ambition can be contrasted unfavourably in the minds of the population with Paralympians’ heroism, it is a desideratum more readily accomplished.
I’ve written previously about the egregious absurdity of Atos having been appointed a Paralympic sponsor. In the course of the Paralympics, demonstrations – christened the “Atos Games” – took place outside the London headquarters of the French mega-corporation (total assets in 2011: 7.36 billion euros), later moving on to the Department for Work and Pensions, organized jointly by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and UK Uncut. They featured the delivery to the resplendent building of a coffin symbolizing the numerous deaths of disabled men and women in whom Atos doctors could detect no trace of infirmity, and protestors holding banners inscribed with slogans such as “Nobody Likes Hurdles as Much as Atos” – the almost insurmountable hurdles of the invidious Work Capability Assessment, that is, which the disabled must try to leap in order to hold onto their welfare pittances. Click on the photographs at the head of this article for larger images of these protests. It scarcely need be added that clashes broke out with police anxious to clamp down on free speech and safeguard corporate interests. Paralympians themselves concealed accreditation badges bearing the Atos logo during the opening ceremony, although invertebrate ParalympicsGB officials denied that this had been the case, and Sebastian Coe was on hand to reprimand their foolishness in opposing a corporation whose sole concern, the noble Lord assured us, lay in “helping” those involved in the Games. LOCOG, the quango supervising the Olympics – whose board can boast collectively of four knighthoods, four CBEs, three MBEs, one OBE, three peerages and a title (or, to satisfy the pedantry of royalists, “style”) of Royal Highness – weighed in with a pronouncement praising Atos as an “incredibly valuable technology partner” in the administration of the Games. (Again, we are obliged to lament the linguistic imprecision of the expensively educated, assuming we are not dealing once more with parapraxis inadvertently revealing truth: “not to be believed” is a definition of “incredibly” listed in Wiktionary.)
The anti-Atos demonstrations have been barely noticed by mainstream British media. One was hard pressed to find coverage of them on the BBC; the curious television viewer would have gleaned more from a report broadcast on Russia Today, in which Laura Smith gave a platform to protestors decrying the inhumanity of medical tests regarded with “fear and loathing” (MP Iain McKenzie’s description) by the disabled, whose plight does little to move BBC presenters who draw a portion of their salaries from disabled license fee payers. When the Corporation belatedly woke up to the issue, in an edition of the Daily Politics on 6 September, its commentator of choice was Daily Mail hack Melanie Phillips, infamous scourge of “multiculturalism” and other chimeras conjured forth by the fevered right-wing imagination (and, let us not forget, an authority cited with admiration in the racist manifesto that served as prologue to Anders Breivik’s killing spree). As a melancholy footnote to the protests, in the week they were taking place, one more person, Cecilia Burns, succumbed to a terminal illness after being found by Atos to be fit for work – so fit, indeed, that in her capability assessment she had been rated by an Atos doctor as meriting zero points for impairment. The wearing by Paralympians of black armbands would have been an appropriate response, but we can conjecture that the spectre of disqualification ruled out any such outward display of mourning.
As the Paralympics approached their climax – or, one might say, were close to attaining their apotheosis – a Cabinet reshuffle revealed that the Olympic interlude had emboldened the Tories to ratchet that body’s composition even further to the right (and to include in it a Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, as enthusiastic about homeopathy as he is regarding the drastic dilution of the NHS budget). A government of fearsome reactionaries is now poised to turn the screw yet tighter on workers, the unemployed and, not least, the disabled. Memories of sporting “glory” will swiftly fade; after a short interval, most people will have forgotten that, as BBC hyperbole had it, for a transient moment “Britannia rule[d] the waves” anew, even if only in the symbolic arena of Olympic sailing contests. What will remain will be brutal class war conducted from above, resulting in the obscene enrichment of the few and the immiseration and subservience of the many, assisted in no small measure by the ideological mystification wrought by cultural ephemera like sporting events. The Paralympics have as their stated goal the intention to “inspire a generation.” Unfortunately, unless the neoliberal counterrevolution can be defeated, the reality will be quite different: a generation mired in poverty, exploitation and existential insecurity. Mental illness, including the psychotic conditions with which my fellow members of the Pathways group have grappled so bravely, will significantly exceed its already widespread incidence. The British state will stand ready to respond, partly with the eviscerated resources of a privatized NHS, but primarily with the curative environment of a prison cell. Such will be the sorry aftermath of the Olympic summer of 2012.


