LONDON'S OLYMPIC BID: Richard Williams welcomes London's Olympic bid but is highly sceptical given the British Government's track record

All sorts of conflicting emotions are stirred by the news that the British Government is sanctioning a London bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, after months of debate and uncertainty. At first you find yourself wanting to say, in a hideous bit of Thatcherite vernacular which seems thoroughly appropriate to the occasion, "Go for it!" In the mind's eye, a forest of construction cranes decorates the skyline while batteries of cement mixers rumble away below, creating the foundations of a brighter future.

The positive arguments for a bid are undeniably seductive, not least because they have optimism on their side. Craig Reedie and Simon Clegg make fine advocates for the British Olympic Association. The idea of regenerating Stratford in the way that the 2002 Commonwealth Games revived east Manchester is an appealing one. A lot of fun would be had. Jobs would be created in the labouring and marketing sectors. And any contradiction, any view that advances doubts and reservations, can seem crabby and small-minded.

In a time and place when gestures seem to count for more than deeds, the Olympic bid is a grand one. If Britain could do it in 1908 and 1948, the supporting chorus sings, surely it can do it now. Britain is, after all, a country with a role as significant in the history of organised sport as Greece and France. If it were not bidding to host the Olympic Games at a time when it also claims the status of the world's fourth largest economy, there would have to be something very wrong.

But if Britain is the fourth largest economy, heaven help the fifth. Or the 105th. Anyone not insulated by wealth and status from the realities of Britain in 2003 knows how little progress the British government has really made over the past six years in the areas that have a genuine impact on daily life.

Perhaps crime, health, education and the transport infrastructure are genuinely intractable problems, at least over a term and a half in government. In which case Tony Blair no doubt sees an Olympic bid as an opportunity to be seen to be doing something. Yet we know, deep down, that doing something - something of substance, anyway - is hardly this government's forte.

Ask the relatives of the victims of the Potters Bar rail crash, whose observance of the first anniversary of the tragedy last week included volleys of anger directed not just at the failure to apportion blame but at the apparent absence of any serious desire for a proper investigation. What relevance does that have to an Olympic bid? It simply provides yet more evidence with which to call Downing Street's priorities into question.

Narrowing the scrutiny to the government's involvement in sport, we might choose to examine two further pieces of evidence. First there is the sports minister's recent endorsement of Cadbury's scheme to persuade children to buy more of its chocolates by promising to fund the purchase of sports equipment for their schools. What kind of a government would permit such an arrangement? One that is also part of a culture which allows McDonald's to sponsor football coaching schemes for children. A morally bankrupt one, in other words.

And what kind of government is it that promotes an Olympics bid while continuing to close and approve commercial redevelopment plans for school sports grounds? There have been more than 200 such closures since New Labour came to power in 1997 - after they had joined the belated but near-universal criticism of a Tory administration responsible for removing thousands of grounds from use by school children.

Last December the Guardian newspaper reported that the London Borough of Camden, with a population of 300,000, has not a single grass pitch available to schoolchildren. Only a third of primary schoolchildren are now taught to swim. These are among the dismal phenomena that ought to have been tackled before the government gave its backing to a bid.

There. And I haven't even mentioned the humiliation of the 2006 World Cup bid. Or Picketts Lock. Or the Dome.

Guardian Service