'Ackney 'ypocrisy

You might remember Nike nicking Hackney Council's logo a few weeks back. Squeaky clean, painfully New Labour Hackney Mayor Jules Pipe was heard to fulminate about how terribly unfair all this was, Hackney Council poor innocent victims of copyright theft, boo hiss to nasty corporations, etc etc.

Well... I recevied this email:

Just days after making threats to sue Nike for stealing its logo, Hackney Council has launched its London 2012 Olympic Games logo to cries of hypocrisy and theft.

Hackney Council, which has done nothing to help Hackney's arthritis sufferers, has angered them further by stealing their representative body's logo to promote the Olympics, disability activists claim.

Hackney Council has angered many of Hackney’s arthritis sufferers by “stealing a logo well-known and respected by them, to use as its Olympic logo”. Ironically, Hackney Council recently complained that Nike stole their logo to use on their 'Hackney Marshes' brand of sports clothing and equipment.

Hackney Council’s London 2012 Olympic Games design appears to be identical to the NRAS Support Network logo and remarkably close to the main NRAS logo.

“How can Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, denounce Nike for nicking a logo while he carries out the same action himself?” said John Thornton, chair of Disability Sport Hackney and himself an arthritis sufferer. “In my book, that’s outright hypocrisy.”

“Mayor Jules Pipe has rightly come under criticism for doing less than nothing to help people with arthritis in the London Borough of Hackney. He has allowed the swimming pools here to fall into rack and ruin, and even when they do reopen, they will largely be inaccessible to disabled people and it will cost us more to use than to travel to surrounding boroughs, he said.

“He's done nothing for grass-roots sport, he’s working with Olympic planners to turn over the Hackney Marshes football pitches to tarmac crews. Hackney Council Cabinet members have given them to the Olympic crew to be turned into a massive car park. Re-opening London Fields open air lido won’t make up for all the facilities we’ve lost.”

Due to years of under-investment and maladministration it is now not possible to swim in a Hackney Council 25 metre pool and completely impossible to swim in a public pool. Instead the only pools available are the two or three small pools in private gyms. No hydrotherapy facilities exist in Hackney and the closed Clissold Leisure Centre, built at a cost estimated at £45,000,000, was not constructed to be accessible. The works to complete it, which have now been abandoned, have not been specified to improve access beyond what was absolutely necessary in law at the time of its original construction.

“To add insult to injury, the Council have purloined a well-known and well-respected national symbol – the logo for the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society - and used it for their own self-aggrandisement. It wouldn't be so bad if he cared a jot about enabling disabled people to use sports facilities. Instead, we have no accessible pools in Hackney and, if we are on benefits, we couldn’t afford the exorbitant entry fees.”

Have a look for yourself.