Our friends in Westminster have voted that more money from the Eamon Holmes fronted tax on the poor, the National Lottery, can be used to plug the funding gap for the 2012 Olympics.
Culture Secretary James Purnell said the £9.3bn budget for the Games (almost four times the estimate that helped win the bid in 2005) is "robust". We doubt it. How has it suddenly become robust? The real lottery here is determining how much this event is going to cost. There still remains issue that the numbers are based on unrealistic predictions of property price rises in the future.
The shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, called the decision,
an extraordinary way to fund a £9.3bn Olympics budget - to cut budgets for grassroots sport, the very budgets that could provide the sporting legacy which was the big promise of 2012.
We're still pant wettingly excited about the Olympics, but why can't budgets have been realistic in the first place? Have they never watched Grand Designs on Channel 4? Fancy building projects always go over budget.
We must, of course, temper our excitement with a thought for what we stand to lose once Olympic city is built, the character of London's good ol' East End -
