Local MP John Grogan
With the World Cup reaching its climax and the Wimbledon fortnight underway my mind turns to sport.
It is now nearly a year since London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. I only got really enthusiastic when a couple of weeks before the announcement was made I spoke to a primary school class of 11 year olds in a village not a dozen miles from the campus. Instead of asking me whether I had met the Queen or how much I got paid, they were eager to learn if I thought London would carry the day. Many had never been to our capital city but in their eyes I could see the calculations that they would be coming of age in 2012 and what better way to mark it than the Olympic Games.
One idea I am pressing the Government to adopt, is the right to paddle and swim in the rivers of England and Wales. A few years ago members of York University Canoe Club came to see me at one of my surgeries in Fulford and pointed out that only two per cent of rivers south of the border are open to non powered craft. Except for rights of navigation on four rivers it is the landowners who have the final say on river access. It is a big contrast to the situation in Scotland where since 2003 the right to roam has applied to water as well as land. Canoeing is a sport which has boasted British Olympic medallists in the past and a right to paddle would be a cost free way on encouraging the further development of the sport.
The University’s Common Room bars have no doubt been brimming with excitement during screenings of World Cup matches. It is a magnificent thing that unlike in Germany and Spain where many of the matches are only available live on pay per view, every game in the UK is available to all on free to air TV. In London every bar, café and restaurant and even some launderettes and shops have installed televisions. This universal access certainly adds considerably to the world cup atmosphere. This did not happen by accident but because Parliament decided to add the whole World Cup finals to the list of ‘Crown Jewels’ of sport which must be available to free to air TV. An example, if ever there was one, of the close ties between politics and sport.
