Re-enter Big Brother Ken: wellworn smiley face, well-worn Stalinist hat. If you're worried by his rising transport costs, just you wait for the increases in Council Taxes that the forthcoming Olympics will create. Transport for London? London Olympics?

Whose London? Sure as hell it isn't Londoners'. The 'Games' will cost an estimated £2.375 billion (not including security, of which there will be the need for a great deal) and in one way or another it will be Londoners who'll be paying for them. And who'll profit?
You got it. The DodgyDoings of the world (not to forget the main sponsors, those bastions of British cultural heritage, CocaCola and McDonalds), all endorsed, or course, by the Blair/Bush consortium.

Several summers back, while pedalling with my partner along the River Lea, where it borders with Hackney Marshes, we came across a working family who'd taken the day off to picnic on the beach that they'd so lovingly created. Now here was truly a piece of Londoners' London. They'd cleared the broken bottles, bent bicycle frames and trashed supermarket trolleys, and created a perfect haven within the treelined river bank. 'Can't afford Benidorm', they'd laughingly informed us: 'come and join us.' We did. The company was good, the beer flowed and the cheese rolls tasted fabulous. It was a hot day, and eventually we one by one waded into the water. Of course it was polluted - after all, it's completely normal business practice to defile the planet's natural resources, the Mediterranean being just as shit- filled as the River Lea, only you can't smell it so bad. Nonetheless, we had a great time splashing around regardless of the health warnings, which any right-minded citizen has learnt to take with a pinch of salt. The Government warn that 'Smokers Die Young': well, if they care that much about people, what about soldiers? They die a lot younger, so why isn't Blair calling them back from Iraq?

And what about cars and planes? They're a health hazard - but I don't see them being banned in public places. No, it's all down to overheads, which somewhat neatly brings me to the point of my riverside idyll. At the very spot that working Londoners (the ones who, in the face of bomb threats, are told to stand proud in overcrowded tube trains) had built their own beach, the Olympics Delivery Authority (ODA) plan to fell the riverside trees of East Marsh, tarmac the public playing fields which traditionally have been open ground, and build a massive flyover across the river so that the Olympic elite can look down on the urban desert where once the peasants played their own games.

Does all this remind you of Baghdad? No? Well. It should. We've heard it all before: liberation, reconstruction, freedom, democracy, which is current Western parlance for razing to the ground established communities and their facilities for the simple motive of profit.

Londoners' London? Well get this: ODA members are not democratically appointed, which, put simply, means that it's more jobs for the boys. Halliburton? Enron? Bechtel? You may not see the names, but for sure they'll be in there somewhere. With central government approved powers to go over the heads (more overheads) of local authorities, Big Brother and the ODA have been given carte blanche on planning and, with the additional right of compulsory purchase, will see those plans are put into operation regardless of what you or I might think. Remember the Dome/ Well, this ain't a dome, it's a full-scale blanket, and if you're an East Londoner you're gonna be smothered by it. And yes, of course part of ODA's folio is to 'reconfigurate' butchered lands once the Games are over, but here's a simple question: if it would take one hundred and ten years to recon?gurate the mature black poplars that ODA plan to fell on the banks of the Lea, and less than one year to build an estate of Lego Homes on the playing fields that they intend to smother with tarmac, which scenario is the one that Londoners should sensibly expect to be put into operation? Don't bother with postcards. I for one already know.

And, by the way, Happy Christmas.

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