(I’m not interested in sport, but I found the non-commentary version of the Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony fascinating).
Any event that has Nimrod, Jerusalem, Tubular Bells, the Industrial Revolution, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, James Bond, Simon Rattle, Rowan Atkinson, Shami Chakrabarti, and the Red Arrows, has my vote! (I quite like “Abide with me”, but perhaps “Band on the run” would have been more appropriate than “Hey Jude”?)
You can’t have everything, but perhaps James Dyson and Adele would have made things better. (And if Adele had given birth a few weeks early, at least there would have been plenty of nurses and beds around! Now that would have made this opening ceremony hard to follow!)
The Opening Ceremony pissed-off some people, and confused some others. Great!
What is the point of being British if you don’t do those things?
MP Aidan Burley was one of those pissed-off. He described it on Twitter as “leftie multicultural crap”. (I too am not in favour of multiculturalism). Yet what was multicultural about it? I didn’t see anything that hinted at the risk and existence of cultural enclaves on the UK. I wonder if he meant “too many black faces”? (Or given his history of a “Nazi-themed stag party” perhaps he meant “too many Jewish faces”, whatever that might mean). If so, he really needs to distinguish between race, which has no valid objections, and culture, which in principle certainly can have valid objections.
Perhaps the most stupid article from someone who may have been pissed off or may just be pretending is this idiot who ranted about the NHS in the Daily Mail. He chose to remind us of a recent failing of part of the NHS, as a criticism of a celebration of the historical achievement of the creation of the NHS with nurses in historical costumes.
ps: I guess Shami Chakrabarti was a bit embarrassed at being announced as a founder of Liberty. That would probably make her over 100!