In short, I think there's an overwhelming case for pulling the plug on the 2012 Olympics, though I don't imagine for a moment that anyone will have the courage to do so. Governments seem convinced that hosting the Games is good for them, good for the economies they run and so on. There is not a shred of evidence for this, at least in democracies. There is a seven-year gap between the allocation and holding of the Games and nearly always someone else in power by the time they occur. And economists have failed to turn up any evidence of economic benefits even in what are considered to be the successful cases, such as Sydney 2000, which have to be offset against disasters like Montreal 1976.

A question of internal policy is connected with this: what is to be done about the relatively vast sporting bureaucracy which has developed in the form of the sports councils and other agencies? The connection is that much of what they do is to implement policies which are made not by elected governments but by Singos - such as the increasingly desperate and authoritarian campaign against doping. There is a case for simply closing much of this down. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to point career administrators in a different direction. Just as they shifted from luring Muslim ladies into swimming pools to the fostering of "excellence", perhaps they could now be pointed in the direction of boosting club autonomy and traditional sporting values.

Finally, there is one of the few important issues which seems (though it is only seems) to distinguish the parties: school sport. The Robertson statement wants to get "back" to an imagined world of competitive school sport and even wants to fund inter-school "Olympics". It invokes the old myth of left-wing anti-competitive values as being responsible for the decline of school sport in order to justify the kind of pro-competitive values which Labour has actually espoused, at least since it got back into office in 1997. The equal and opposite myth is that Margaret Thatcher was entirely responsible for the decline through her government's encouragement of the sale of school playing fields and its introduction of the National Curriculum. Both myths have an element of truth in them, but the more important truth is that the kind of teacher prepared to spend their leisure time coaching sport, though common enough in my youth, was bound to be in terminal decline for all sorts of inexorable reasons - and most of the playing fields were already little used. Note also that state school skiing trips thrived in the Thatcher period.

In any case, I am in two minds about school sport. My own teenage years passed in a triumphant and comradely sporting blur - which seems a good way to pass them. But this was at a voluntary-aided grammar school which modelled itself on Rugby. And I'm doubtful about whether this is remotely possible today in most state schools and also doubtful in retrospect about what the less sporting boys got out of it. My own sons learned most of their sport in clubs, a more diverse experience in many ways and one which made them much more part of the community. It would be wrong, I think, to have a dogmatic or general policy on this issue.