Not a bang but a shameful whimper

THE Evening Standard had the idea, Mayor Livingstone lit the fuse, and millions of people got ready to celebrate London's spectacular New Year's Eve fireworks display which promised to restore our credibility after the failure of the River of Fire and the farce of the Dome.

Now, through a wonderfully British combination of fear, bloodymindedness and petty conservatism, the fuse has sputtered out, the fireworks have been cancelled and London is the laughingstock of the world.

It almost beggars belief that, despite the prospect of sponsorship and popular support, we cannot even organise a firework display.

Paris, whose Millennium Eve brainwave to turn the Eiffel Tower into a Roman candle would almost certainly have been forbidden in Britain on health and safety grounds, and Sydney whose fabulous display was way beyond the capability of our own petty officialdom, will be splitting their sides.

Does anybody any longer seriously believe that London could host an effective Olympic Games given the craven small-mindedness of London Underground management, and those lawyers, councillors, bureaucrats and placemen whose fear of the compensation culture leads them to block any initiative which might conceivably involve them in liability?

London is in the humiliating position of someone who throws a grand neighbour-hood party, only to have it cancelled at the last moment by officials terrified that a guest might slip on the pavement.

For nobody is it more

not while the event was taking place.

By that stage, the fireworks schedule had already been moved forward twice from the proposed midnight hour - first to 7pm and then to 5pm. The firework displays had been moved away from the river to avoid the possibility of overcrowding, and scattered to different sites around the capital.

It was death by a thousand cuts. The police warned the Mayor that the event might have to be cancelled because they were not being given sufficient time to prepare.

The Royal Parks officials, worried that people might trample on their flowerbeds, resolutely refused to keep Hyde Park and St James's Park open so that people would have space to watch the fireworks.

Bob Geldof, the organiser of the New Year's Eve spectacular through his company Ten Alps, found the local councils were unwilling to open municipal buildings and public lavatories (let alone London squares).

The Millennium Commission, as if not content with precipitating one fiasco the Millennium Dome - did its best to create another by demanding that Yahoo, the main sponsor who was putting up one- quarter of the money, should take its name off the event.

Once this happened, Yahoo quite understandably lost humiliating than the Mayor, Ken Livingstone, who enthusiastically supported the idea from the start, seeing it as an opportunity to bring a little joy into Londoners' lives. He knocked heads together, only to find that those heads were so thick that their owners paid him no attention.

None were thicker than those of the Tube chiefs, whose reaction to the numbers of people likely to pour into central London was, amazingly, to decline to run any service at all, on health and safety grounds, and the mainline rail companies who at first said they could not run services because they did not have the go-ahead from the Met.

MOST other European countriesare increasing the number of trains they run on New Year's Eve, but that is not the British way.

The crowds would have been no greater than the Tube's daily rush- hour traffic, but such was their terror that a merrymaker might accidentally slip on the escalator or fall off the platform that they were prepared to sabotage the entire occasion to save their skins.

Not until it was too late did LU management back down and say that they would run a reasonable service, though not for an hour before, and much of its interest in funding an event which was already descending like a dud rocket thanks to the decisions to cut the midnight show and cut off access to the festival by train.

Meanwhile the Government ministers who could have interceded on transport and safety issues, notably Mr John Prescott, ignored the potential of the event and sat on their hands and sniggered at Ken Livingstone's increasingly desperate attempts to get the show on the road.

The collapse of London's New Year's Eve spectacular, of course, leaves Londoners out of pocket since the Greater London Assembly will have to pick up much of the bill for contracts which have already been signed.

The entire episode is thoroughly shameful.

IN the private sphere, this country is one of the most successful in the world. Risk-taking private enterprise, in the City, in information technology and a thousand other fields, has created a booming economy. Yet in the public sphere, we are becoming so timid, so cautious, so wedded to the victim culture, so terrified of litigation, that we lose all initiative. As Bob Geldof said today, we are living in a can't-do society.

The Government has colluded in the creation of a nanny state in which passengers on an aircraft are woken up in the middle of the night if their fastened seatbelt is not visible to the steward.

All one can hope is that the disastrous collapse of London's New Year's Eve spectacular will encourage all those concerned to get it right next year.

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