Olympic Thought Police
Rachel Cooke interviews Iain Sinclair | Books | The Observer
Hackney council does not want its author speaking in any of its libraries because he is "anti-Olympics". At this, Sinclair laughs gleefully. "So wonderful for me. So absurd and crazy, a metaphor for insanity, in fact, but the best piece of publicity. I was asked to go along to Stoke Newington library to speak to 20 people: old hippies and local history buffs, probably. But I'd written an anti-Olympics piece in the London Review of Books, and so the Hackney thought police decided: no, we can't have this person in our library. They lied about this all the way down the line, insisting it was nothing to do with the Olympics but that they can't have 'controversial' topics discussed in libraries. Eventually someone from the Hackney Citizen used the Freedom of Information Act to get the transcript [of what was said in a meeting] and, sure enough, it came directly from the Mayor, Jules Pipe, saying that this person is anti-Olympics, and he doesn't go into our libraries. So Hackney Council is my co-sponsor, really - and, of course, this manipulation [on the part of the council] is also a big theme of the book."
Sinclair goes further than most when it comes to condemning what he regards as the folly of the Olympics. "It's catastrophic. Apocalyptically catastrophic. It's brutalising: the time scale of it, the fact that it was imposed from above, the consultation a farce, and the promise of this legacy - which is what? It's Westfield shopping mall, basically [a similar mall to west London's Westfield, will be built out east]. Have you been there? Horrendous. Drains the life blood out of you in seconds. Then they have the nerve to call it the People's Park. What do they think was there before? It was the people's park: anglers, birdwatchers, footballers. Now they're all gone, so it's the opposite. I'm deeply disturbed and angry....it's like an invaded city. Like Basra. A sea of mud. Convoys rolling in day and night, day and night."