Perhaps...

... London wasn't such a great idea after all for the 2012 Olympic Games. Tessa has told MPs today that the cost of the Olympic Park alone has gone up from nearly £2.4bn to £3.3bn since the games were announced, a rise of £900m, or about 40%. The usual suspects - Tories, LibDems and anarchists have been quick to suggest that the overall cost of building and running the games and regenerating the Lower Lea Valley might rocket past £8bn, i.e. the Olympic Park costs could rise to £5-6bn. I can assure everyone in Hackney that this is a malicious slur on our government and no such ridiculous inflation will occur while Labour remains in power. To prove this I brushed up on my old maths skills this evening and drew some graphs based on Tessa's figures.

The City of London Debtors' Prison, Whitecross Street

If you take the % rise in infrastructure cost from £2.4bn in June 2005 to £3.3bn this December at extrapolate that % increase to June 2012, you get the figure of £10.2bn as shown in the first graph.

Obviously the money has to come from somewhere. When we started this project, Red Ken slapped an outrageous £20 precept on each Council Tax payer in London. Now if we take the increase in infrastructure costs and allocate it evenly to each Council Tax payer in London, we get the figures shown in the second graph.

This would mean that each household in London would need to pay an additional £2,694 in 2012. This would be much less if we spread the bill over each year between now and then - perhaps as little as £500 per annum.

So where's the catch? Well, in order to ensure that the initial increase is dramatically reduced in coming years, we will need someone with extensive and trusted skills in prudent economic management at the national helm.

I think you know who I'm talking about. So the choice is: Vote Tory and pay through your nose for something that we started or vote Labour and pay a bit less because we are slightly less inept than they are.