Diane Abbott: The Games? Nothing to do with us

As a Hackney resident and a MP, I take a close interest in the 2012 Olympics. If you sit in the lounge of one of my best friends in the borough, you can see the Olympic Park soaring skyward. Yet for all the positive impact the Games have had on our lives, they might as well be on another planet. There have been so many disappointments. And, as they draw nearer, so many things seem disturbing.

The East End welcomed the Olympics. We thought they might bring regeneration. But in terms of providing jobs for local people, they have been a bitter disappointment. Some 44,000 people have found work on the Olympic Park and Village since 2008. But only 8,081 were from the East End (i.e. Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Greenwich) – less than 10 per cent.

The figures for local labour include workers from all over Britain (and Europe) packed into boarding houses that happened to have an East End address. And it wasn't about the skills and training. There are plenty of highly skilled bricklayers, electricians and others in the East End. The Olympic Development Authority was just never serious about jobs for local people. Even with apprenticeships, at one point there was only one apprentice from Hackney on the entire site. In the wake of the riots, the Government may live to regret not doing enough with a golden opportunity to provide jobs for young men from areas like Hackney.

The Olympics were meant to help us be a fitter Britain. Instead, they are sponsored by two of the biggest culprits for childhood obesity – Coca-Cola and McDonald's. It will even have the biggest McDonald's in the world on site. Another distinctly unhealthy sponsor, it emerged this week, will be the American company Dow Chemical, which in 2001 bought Union Carbide, the company that had owned the factory in India where an estimated 15,000 people died after a poison gas leak in 1984. And this week's revelation that the Olympics could be protected by surface-to-air missiles marks another departure from reality.

As Europe plunges deeper into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the 2012 Olympics – costing £9bn – seem increasingly inappropriate. They didn't provide the jobs promised. The pledges of a healthier and fitter Britain are being washed away in a tide of fizzy drinks. And while the shiny new venues are spectacular, more and more the Olympic Park seems like a gigantic shimmering Star Wars entity – which ordinary East Enders can see but cannot touch.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North