Newham, the council in which much of the Olympics is being held, is celebrating the fact that the world will descend upon it next year for the greatest sporting show on earth by closing down its only swimming pool in E15 because it says it has no money.

The sixth poorest borough in Britain had until recently the highest paid council chief executive in the country and spent £111 million on its new glitzy waterside offices is clearly a place of many contradictions. Its residents have some of the highest levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in the country yet it closes down the kind of place that would help detonate the time bomb the health service faces in the future when the fried chicken kids of today become the long term patients of tomorrow.

You would have thought that with all the big businesses coming into the area like Westfield, with Excel building a new hotel and with Siemens taking a landmark presence the council leaders would have extracted cash out of them to fill holes created by government cuts. This is the same council that recently offered to lend £40 million to West Ham football club to take over the stadium after the games, so there’s clearly something not stacking up here.

You have to wonder what kinds of games are really being played over there.