Ice Swimming
If the government wants to persuade us that it understands quality-of-life issues, then sport is a good place to start.
This is the season of fresh resolutions, many of them adopted to deal with bulging waistlines and that non-specific blobby feeling you may recognize after the Christmas break. Like many women I will be soon ploughing up and down a swimming pool. Like many parents I will also be watching children swim – my daughters in fact. Swimming is the single most popular sport for girls and the second most popular for boys.
It is also a good test case for the government’s wider commitment to sport. Sport has always been a second-order political issue, perhaps even third-order. It is the national obsession, we are told, gripping for spectators and players, but hardly something to swing elections. New Labour famously made much of its laddish addiction to football. Its modernizing men have been gym-using, marathon-training urbanites. And yet all that was somehow outside “serious” politics – sport has been “Look, I’m human too” downtime. This may be about to change. Why? Because of another Labour success, the one that made the prime minister do a jig of genuine delight and surprise just before he heard of the London bombings – London’s Olympic bid success.
Throughout this parliament, there will be a steadily building hubbub of interest in major construction projects, national plans for this or that sport. Parents and coaches will be hissing to kids at gyms or running tracks that they could be good enough to make it in 2012. There’s enough of a focus to make the politics of sport almost sexy. And if Labour wants to persuade us in a fourth election that it understands the all-important quality of life issues, sport is a good place to start.
And, Olympics bid aside, the picture is mixed. Richard Caborn has done his best to reverse such national disgraces as the selling-off of school and community sports fields, yet the picture is still pretty terrible. In 1994, the last time a survey was done, England had nearly 78,000 such pitches. Since then we have lost 34,000. In a crowded, urban and increasingly obese country, that is shameful. The law has been changed to make the sale of school playing fields a bit harder, but the price and shortage of land remain powerful incentives for schools to sell them off.
An even sharper measurement, however, may be swimming. More than 12 million swim regularly. Unlike football, which is hugely commercialized, this sport depends on public subsidy. Swimming pools are expensive to build and maintain and, since the Victorians and Edwardians, have been prime examples of local authority beneficence.
Many, in the centers of the old industrial cities, are now crumbling and squalid. Many are faced with closure; campaigns to keep local pools open have been up and swimming hard from Shrewsbury to Ipswich, from Plymouth to Kentish Town. Crystal Palace, meant to be a national centre for English swimming, is a dingy and vile-smelling disgrace. England has just 16 50-metre pools open to the public and only two are in London, where, admittedly, there are plans for another six, including at the Olympic centre in Stratford.
There seems to be plenty of private money for expensive fitness clubs for the well-off and single but only public funding can provide the pools used by women and families. Yet swimming is not a statutory responsibility of cash-strapped local authorities and too often, as in Hackney, where new combined sports centers have been built to replace the old swimming pools, they have been construction disasters.
The former sports minister Kate Hoey said recently that “all the fine words about tackling obesity and the fitness of the nation proclaimed by politicians are worthless if not translated into resources to keep our swimming pools”. She’s absolutely right; those who don’t swim might like to imagine how they would feel if only local authorities operated football stadiums and, all round the country, they were being closed down.
It isn’t only swimming. Over the Christmas break, many tens of thousands of people must have experienced the increasingly rare pleasure of ice-skating. Temporary rinks have flowered all round London, as well as in and in other cities. There are just over 60 permanent facilities in Britain, but that is only one for every million potential users – and large areas have none at all. There is a single rink in the West Country and nothing in East Anglia.
So what am I saying? Not that the government does not care about sport, or has done nothing at all. There are endless bodies and meetings, position papers and Olympics-related appointments. Winning the 2012 games certainly matters. Britain will either be praised around the world as having triumphantly produced a successful games or else our notorious weakness in capital projects and our crumbling transport infrastructure will be embarrassingly revealed. The stakes are too high for any government to let London fail, so London will undoubtedly benefit.
The real questions are: who in London will benefit, and what about the rest of the country? Having the Olympics is probably a great thing, but not if it is at the expense of decent sporting facilities for millions of people round the country. The health of the many, as Labour would put it, should trump the effervescent celebration of the few.
Swimming is important of itself, but it is also a good political symbol. It is a hugely popular but inevitably public-sector activity, which almost everyone can enjoy. If the public good means anything these days, when libraries are being eroded by Google and Amazon, then public swimming pools should be a policy battleground which, if not up there with schools and hospitals, is bobbing below them.
The cliché of the hour is that Labour is scared of David Cameron and squabbling about its agenda. A crusade to make Britain proud of its public sports facilities should be part of the answer. In all the welter of resolutions, I can’t think of a better one for blobby ministers.
By Jackie Ashley
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