Back local sport, not the Olympics

One recent investigation estimates London 2012 will cost our austerity-stricken nation up to 24bn pounds. Once the Olympics was an amateur sporting event: now rich nations lavish vast sums on young athletes who lack any personal attribute other than the ability to run fast or throw something a long way.

They fork out this cash to prove the greatness of their country. The Olympics is thus a glorification of the scourge of our age, nationalism.

Furthermore, the Olympics is a feel-good celebration of corporate capitalism.The games are sponsored by giant multinationals including Coca-Cola and McDonalds, whose products are, ironically, inimical to healthy bodies. Add to this that the UK's Olympians include drugs cheats like Dwain Chambers, and we need to ask: what sort of messages are we sending to the children forced to stand in the cold and wave flags? The extravagant celebrations have cost the city's taxpayers considerable sums of money that could have been used to promote real sport in Newcastle.

For example, Gibson Street Badminton Centre is the region's only dedicated badminton centre. It is housed in one of oldest public bath houses in the country, and remains an architectural treasure. However, with a leaking roof that the council refuses to repair, it is in danger of closure.

Real sport is what real people do in the evenings and weekends after an honest week's hard work: it is that, not the Olympics, that should be supported in Newcastle. Dr NICK MEGORAN.

Islamic protest march - the extremists are being heard only because we are keeping silent

Dr Nick Megoran

Lecturer in Human Geography, Newcastle University

For online responses to this letter, click here

Central Asia - rewriting the rules of the 'great game'

Your description of Central Asian geopolitical futures as a "new great game" (Report, 30 March) is misleading. Central Asia is no one's "backyard", and its leaders have shown a canny ability to keep command of their own futures by being tough negotiators and by playing outsiders off against each other. Rather than being helpless pawns in the hands of master European and American chess players, they have proved adroit at rewriting the rules of the game themselves.

Nick Megoran

Newcastle University



Render justice to the Chagos islanders

It should come as no surprise that the nominally British island of Diego Garcia has been the scene of gross human rights abuses (Embarrassed Miliband admits two US rendition flights refuelled on British soil, February 22). In 1966 the government signed a covert agreement with the US to remove the 1,500 native Chagossians. Their pets were gassed and their possessions confiscated to cajole them into leaving for the Seychelles, where they were imprisoned, before being dumped on the docks in Mauritius. Denied their rightful British citizenship and reasonable compensation, they were reduced to abject poverty and a soaring mortality rate. This was so that the US could build an airbase named, ironically, Camp Justice.

In 2000 the high court ruled this was an "an abject legal failure" and ordered that the Chagossians be allowed to return to outlying islands near Diego Garcia. However, in 2003 the government shamelessly used royal prerogative to crush this ruling. If the Brown government genuinely wishes to distance itself from the Blair era's discredited foreign policy, it should not only address the issue of extraordinary renditions, but allow the Chagossians to return home.

Dr Nick Megoran

Newcastle University

For more information on this topic, visit the website of the UK Chagos Support Association