Moan, moan, moan. You give people the Olympic Games, and all they do is carp about how it's going to cost them £9bn and they didn't want it anyway. Then when you take the money from lottery good causes to pay for it, they complain even more. Ingrates.

So what's a government to do? As right now £1 in every £5 of lottery money spent on good causes is going towards the Olympics, even the Conservatives have managed to make some political capital from it. It can't be denied any longer that people are unhappy about this. Amazingly, even Sport England (the national agency responsible for advising on, investing in and promoting community sport) have complained, saying the £55.9m decrease in their funding was a "a real blow to community sport in England". Rather hard to dismiss that with platitudes about the overall benefits of the Olympics across the nation for generations to come.

Probably Tessa Jowell reads the Ranger's Blog, because now BBC News reports:

Profit from land bought for the 2012 London Olympics will reimburse National Lottery funds which are helping to pay for the Games, the government has said.

An extra £675m of lottery funds has helped cover the Olympics' £9.35bn budget, which has risen from £2.35bn.

Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell said sales of the 312 hectares of Olympic Park land in Stratford, east London, would help pay that back after 2012.

Not a bad idea, on the face of it. However, that still leaves us probably 6 years or so during which the lottery funds will be seriously impoverished. That kind of payback could take years even after the Olympics has passed. The Millennium Dome, for example, has only just this year been sold on for productive use. What kind of interim measures will keep the community action flame alive, whilst the Olympic villages gradually rise above East London?