The Spectator

A place for sport Sir: Many of us in the education world are baffled by the political furore over school sports fields. Harris Federation runs 13 academies, largely in tight urban spaces. All manage to deliver outstanding sports lessons. Why? Because of the skill of our sports teachers and the vision of our sponsor, Lord Harris of Peckham, who once dreamt of becoming a professional footballer. Harris Boys’ Academy East Dulwich has sport as a subject specialism but almost no outside space of its own. Bizarrely, in 2008 Southwark Council would only provide planning permission to build the school on condition that we would not use the park opposite for sport. Our local MP, Harriet Harman, has not helped our efforts to get this reversed.

When Sir Mervyn King steps down as Bank of England Governor next June, even his most loyal supporters will struggle to describe his tenure as a success. He failed to spot the massive asset bubble which burst so spectacularly. His job was to keep inflation down, and Britain has instead suffered the worst inflation in Europe. He has injected £375 billion of digitally created money into the economy, to no apparent benefit whatsoever. The Governor has many qualities: he is learned, amiable and resolute. But he has not proven to be much good at running a central bank. The hunt for his successor will begin in the autumn, when the Chancellor will advertise for the job. It will be the most important vacancy in Britain. The job may be tough, but it comes with several perks.

It is a paradox that the nation most committed to free enterprise — the United States — can be one of the most aggressively protectionist countries on earth. The accusations made this week by the New York State Department of Financial Services against Standard Chartered Bank are serious and deserve investigation, as were those made by the US Senate against HSBC a fortnight ago. It may turn out that both banks are guilty of serious failings, but there is no mistaking the relish with which the Americans are beating up on the Brits. They shouldn’t be too quick to point the finger. Gordon Brown’s much-ridiculed refrain about the economic crisis, ‘it started in America’, had a degree of truth.

An outsider viewing the Olympic opening ceremony could easily have gained the impression that Britain was in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A week on Sunday we are promised an equally spectacular closing ceremony. For the moment, the cost of staging the Olympics — £9.3 billion for the games, including £80 ­million for the opening and closing ceremonies alone — has been laid aside in a rush of public enthusiasm. The biggest source of discontent this week has been the rows of empty seats reserved for the IOC’s politburo and their associates. After any big party, of course, there is the risk of a big hangover. The Olympics will be no exception.

The ninth of August will mark the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the credit crunch: the day in 2007 that the banks found themselves frozen out of the debt markets, leading to the Northern Rock collapse and on to the more general banking crisis of 2008. By this stage of the Great Depression, western economies were not only growing again; they had surpassed the level at which they had peaked in the late 1920s. Unemployment was falling and the banking system had regained some solidity. It is no longer accurate, therefore, to describe the economic crisis as the ‘worst since the 1930s’. On some measures it is worse than that. The banks are still far from safe and there is no end yet in sight to the second trough of Britain’s double-dip recession.