A celebration of humanity

As a national daily newspaper, the Morning Star devotes several of its precious pages to sports news and views, because most - though not all - of our readers want and expect it.

For those who are looking at the Morning Star for the first time, we should explain that this is Britain's daily paper of the labour movement and the left.

It is also the only English-language daily socialist paper in the world.

You will not see us advertised on large billboards or the television, because we don't have the advertising revenue with which the daily pro-big-business press promotes itself.

Indeed, you will rarely find our paper mentioned at all on the television or radio - and certainly not on the BBC - even in programmes or reports dedicated to the day's newspaper coverage.

This is one of the ways in which our monopoly-controlled mass media try to restrict political debate to a narrow spectrum of pro-big-business, pro-Nato and pro-Establishment views.

You might already have noticed the obsession of our mass media and top politicians with business, markets and profits.

Minor movements in share prices and currency rates are reported breathlessly all day, every day, while rising prices and falling real incomes - which hugely affect the lives of 30 million people workers and their families - are barely reported at all.

Rampant profiteering by our oil, gas, electricity, pharmaceutical and financial monopolies is normal practice in Big Business Rip-Off Britain plc, and foreign guests should expect to pay well over the odds for almost everything they buy here.

Because our professional career politicians are complicit in this corrupt racket, it should come as no surprise that these Olympic Games are sponsored by such contributors to physical well-being as McDonald's and Coca-Cola.

It is a little-known fact that the Greek goddess of health and fitness, Hygieia, kept herself in trim by regularly swilling down a double burger and fries with a super-size beaker of sweetened swamp water.

Other London Olympic "partners" include some of the world's leading polluters, speculators and child exploiters such as Dow Chemical, Adidas, GE Money, Procter & Gamble, BP, Deloitte and Lloyds TSB.

Spectators may be frisked for non-brand contraband on their way into Olympic events.

Every opportunity will be taken by our unelected Con-Dem government of millionaires to persuade visiting entrepreneurs to invest in Britain, where taxes on profits and wealth are low to non-existent, regulation is a sham, workers are easy to sack and anti-trade union laws are the harshest in Europe.

Nevertheless, it would be churlish not to recognise the Olympic up-sides.

Terrorists attempting to smuggle explosives through our airports will almost certainly have been deterred by long queues, unless they are British, in which case they will be used to them.

Other terrorists who choose not to declare their fighter planes and missiles to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs will find them shot down by ground-to-air batteries sited on high buildings near the main Olympic venues.

Spectators are advised to wear hard hats to protect themselves from any falling debris.

But they should not allow state stupidity nor capitalist greed to prevent these games becoming what they should be - a celebration of the common humanity we all share on this planet.