Sponsor blunder

The Commonwealth Games has been portrayed as an unmitigated success by a mostly compliant media with no willingness to criticise any aspect of the Games, including Atos’s sponsorship of the event.

The fact that the organising committee chose Atos as a major sponsor, with access to a potential market of 1.2 billion people, after having taken 600,000 British sick, disabled and dying people off benefits is a poor reflection on the ethics of the organising committee.

The committee alone should not be blamed, but all those associated with the organisation of the Games, including the 
Scottish Government which funded 80 per cent of the 
budget, have their share of the responsibility. Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister, at Atos HQ in Livingstone in 2012, declared that Atos’s sponsorship was “good” for Glasgow, while knowing her poorest Govan constituents were having their small amount of social security benefits taken from them. It was typical of the poor moral judgment of our politicians.

In the end, campaigners in Glasgow only asked for a written apology from those organising the Games for Atos being chosen as a sponsor, but the so-called “great and good” of the Scottish political establishment could not demonstrate any humility that they had been wrong to choose Atos as a sponsor.

SEAN CLERKIN

Glasgow Against Atos

Aurs Road

Glasgow