The clear winners of our upcoming Olympic Games are the corporate sponsors, many inappropriate for the stated mission of the event, which is to promote world peace and understanding and celebrate the best and brightest of human achievements.

This is the view of Ethical Consumer magazine which devoted much of its July /August issue to pointing out that sponsors such as BP, Rio Tinto and Dow seem to be in it for the greenwash PR opportunities to clean up their tarnished image in respect of the environment. Others are known to be enjoying some lucrative tax avoidance, courtesy of a pathetic British government terrified that the business might have gone elsewhere, and paid for by all their long-suffering and ordinary taxpayers.

Overall there seems to be a growing view that our world would be a far better place if the disgraced International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Lord Coe and Co at the disreputable London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) – and sensitive readers should look away now – didn’t have their hands so deeply into the pockets of their corporate paying members, or their heads so far up their back passages.