91Èȱ¬

There's an unwritten rule that host countries of the Olympics don't criticise each other.

So it's significant that Canadian Olympic chiefs (who staged this year's Vancouver Winter Games) have taken a swipe at Britain over the Government's planned cuts to school sports funding.

Britain has to accept this, of course, because London made all sorts of ambitious promises to the about inspiring children to take up sport during the 2012 bid.

There is a growing belief that the cuts to the (SSPs) will not help that goal at all. Twitter and Facebook are full of a campaign against the changes and I know secondary schools near to where I live have already started petitions .

But to have a foreign national Olympic committee stepping into the row is an unusual development.

The letter from chief executive Jean Dupre to Education Secretary Michael Gove came about because Canada plans to use the specialist in Tower Hamlets in east London for training during the 2012 Games.

I've been to see the school's headmaster Chris Dunne and he was part of the report we did for the Politics Show which you can see on my blog last week.

He told me about the Canadian opposition to Gove's plans which resulted in the letter. He said the Canadians had been impressed with the system.

"When they last visited in the October half term I told them of the decision to abandon the SSPs," he said. "They (including their Chef de Mission Mark Tewksbury, an Olympic Gold Medallist) were visibly stunned, and asked me whether there was anything they could do to help.

"It's a pretty hefty indictment of the Government's actions by a very well-respected international body. "

As I said last week, I can't see this problem going away. That's because the Government is making changes, not only to save money but also because it believes there isn't enough competitive sport in schools. The people who run the SSPs vehemently disagree with this. Somebody must be wrong.

That's why I see a u-turn ahead. The problem the Government has is that every time it and London 2012 start talking about the sporting legacy of the Games, criticis will simply point to the SSP cuts and dismiss any initiative as meaningless.

Without an effective sport's system in schools, 2012's talk means nothing, they will say.

And it's interesting that schools and former sports stars have been so quick to get the petitions going - and also that the subject has landed at Prime Minister's Questions so fast.

This story isn't going away in a hurry.

Olympic security will become a major issue in the next few weeks because of cuts to police force budgets announced in the

We are expecting to hear soon how the 20% cut in budgets over four years will affect the £600m security funding for the Games.

Some security experts have already suggested that twice as much money will actually be needed to keep the Games safe.

But there are growing worries about how any cuts to police forces around the country could affect 2012.

The Met Police is going to need to draft in thousands of officers from forces around the country because it hasn't got enough staff to deal with the busiest days when 9,000 police will be needed on the streets of London. That's 3,000 more police than the toughest event of the year, the Notting Hill Carnival.

That will put extra strain on forces across the country. The Met will need to bring in specialist officers as well from other parts of the country.

I have been speaking to Chris Allison, the Met Police Assistant Commissioner who handles Olympic security.

Interestingly, he told me that the police also has plans in place to handle demonstrations during the Games like the recent student protests. He said:

"What's happened in the last couple of weeks is a timely reminder to the police service nationally about the impact of public disorder and the need of the services to have the capability to deal with it and to deal with it quickly."

That means putting large numbers of officers on the streets and outside venues will be crucial. We already know that a special centre is being set up north of London where officers from around the country will be housed.

But the big question is: will all this be possible if there are cuts in officers across the country?

That's what we are waiting to hear.

Security Minister Baroness Neville-Jones told a special conference on Olympic security today that national exercises to test procedures will take place in the next 20 months, including a range of scenarios.

She also said that it was important for police to focus on events running parallel to the Games, such as Live Sites around the UK where big TV screens will show the action.

The Olympics is the biggest challenge to Britain's police forces in our lifetime. During the Games officers are not expected to get more than one day off per week.

But will it work if there are significant cuts to police numbers?

More: 91Èȱ¬ London 2012

could still finance a move into the if the club were relegated from the Premier League.

I understand that the east London club, who are struggling at the bottom of the table, has told the (OPLC) that the repayment on the loan needed to pay for the conversion of the stadium is relatively small.

Officials have told the OPLC that it would be able to cover the repayments if the club's income dropped in the Championship.

West Ham are currently bidding against for use of the stadium from the 2014-15 season. The OPLC is expected to make a decision on the stadium's anchor tenant by the end of the year.

The conversion of the stadium for football, which will include a new roof and floodlights, is expected to cost around £100m.

West Ham, whose bid is supported by , are regarded as the favourites in the battle but there have been serious questions asked about whether the club has enough money to pay for the move.

Some of the conversion costs are already included in the £9.3 billion Olympic budget. The rest of the funding will come from selling the naming rights for the stadium and from the sale of West Ham's Upton Park ground for redevelopment.

West Ham are understood to have told the OPLC that the rest of the cash would come from a loan from Newham Council.

Neither West Ham nor the OPLC want to discuss the size of the loan in public. But the club is believed to be confident that it can pay back the loan every year to the council. Officials have worked out how they can do that in worse case scenarios such as relegation.

It has also emerged that Westfield, the company building a large shopping centre at the edge of the Olympic Park, is also backing West Ham's bid.

This is a major boost since has a huge amount of influence on the future of the developent, given that it is providing the majority of the new jobs there.

I've said on this blog before that I believe West Ham will win this battle and these new developments will certainly help the club's cause.

Others say today's young generation is not as competitive as we were when we were kids.

I coach sport in my spare time and I have to say these ideas are ridiculous. I have seen 10-year-olds playing cricket in the pouring rain and loving it.

Most children are also naturally competitive. In fact the challenge for the coaching I do is to teach them how to focus that energy and edge on tactics during a game and also how to show respect to the opposition when they've won.

I don't think our schools are breeding a generation of uncompetitive kids as some would suggest.

The real difference to my childhood in the 1970s is that children don't go out and play on their own as much as we did as kids.

You don't see many big games of football or cricket on tiny bits of grass which were such an important part of my childhood in the Midlands.

This has a lot to do with parents' worries about traffic and child protection. The other big problem is that headteachers have so many other subjects to put on the timetables that sport often struggles to get a look-in.

So more effort has to be made to get children out of the house and schools need to be persuaded that sport matters.

The first challenge is not a problem in families where parents have the time and money to take their kids to sports clubs.

But it's a major issue in some of Britain's poorer neighbourhoods where parents (sometimes single) are working so hard that they can't take their kids to clubs.

I've spent a lot of time recently looking into the schools issue where the coalition Government is causing a huge controversy by in English schools.

We went to film for The Politics Show in schools in Tower Hamlets in east London where there is real frustration that specialist sports coordinators could lose their jobs because of the cuts.

The Cabinet is reported today to be split over the decision by Education Secretary Michael Gove. A massive campaign is growing on twitter and facebook against the cuts.

I'm not surprised. The headteachers I talked to said the sports coordinators had played a crucial role in introducing children to many different sports and getting them active. In Tower Hamlets, many of the kids would not have taken up sport without them.

More importantly, the headteacher of a secondary school said there was more competitive sport in his area than ever before. He said it wasn't true schools need more competitions as the Government suggests .

So the view on the streets of east London is simple: If it ain't broke, why fix it? I also know that senior ministers are very worried about the impact of the cuts and that there isn't complete agreement in the Government on this crucial issue.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a U-turn on this one from the Government in the coming months.

All the towards England's 2018 World Cup bid reminds me of a moment during the 2012 Olympic bid campaign which I will never forget.

A few months after London's campaign had been hit by a similar investigation into alleged corruption in the International Olympic Committee, I was talking to a French TV journalist during a visit to rivals Paris.

"We've got all the same stuff that Panorama had, " he told me over a glass or red wine and brie. "But we were told not to use it because it would hamper the Paris bid."

"And you've just accepted that?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders.

When we went to Singapore for the vote in July 2005, I will never forget the face of the same journalist just a few minutes after London beat Paris in the vote. He looked completely dejected and he couldn't look me in the eye.

He had sacrificed his journalistic principles for the "greater good" and it hadn't even worked.

When you've had your home phone tapped (as a foreign correspondent in Europe!), and had the Chinese secret police on your tail when reporting on the Beijing Olympics, you respect some of the wider freedoms we have as reporters in Britain.

I'm not saying the UK is perfect but in 24 years as a journalist, I've never been told not to write or broadcast something for the organisations I've worked for - even when I was at Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail owners), writing for the formidable former Evening Standard editor .

Maybe Veronica recognised me as being as stubborn as she was but it is the duty of all journalists to report on what they see.

And please don't tell me everything has to be exclusive because all reporters use some information which has been published or broadcast before in order to communicate.

The ones who annoy me are the people who label old stuff with the word "exclusive".

The day we agree not to report what we see is the day we need to give up the job.

That's because the goes a long way beyond sport and it's going to affect a huge amount of life in London and in the UK. I'm not convinced the country's totally understood that yet.

The other day I found myself amongst a group of Church leaders at in east London, close to the 2012 Olympic Park.

Looking out of the window at the construction site, representatives from churches across London and the south east were holding hands and praying for the Games to go well.

The religious community is gearing up for a major campaign around the Olympics. It's called "" and involves a large group of churches -- Methodists, Baptists, the Church of England and the Salvation Army.

They want churches up and down the country to play a major role in the Games. They have ideas like providing accommodation for volunteers and for the families of foreign athletes. They also want to organise a prayer relay to follow the torch around the UK and they plan to set up events linked to the Games.

Churches have played a big role in the Games since the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta in the United States.

Duncan Green, the Olympics coordinator, told me that the church has to be involved in the biggest event in Britain for decades. Otherwise it really could be accused of being irrelevant to life today, he says.

But is it right for the religious community to get involved in the Olympics? Do sport and religion really mix?

British athletics officials were due to present a bid to the IAAF, the world governing body of athletics, later this month where they faced a rival bid from Beijing.

But have now scrapped the 2015 campaign and will make another bid for the 2017 championships because the final decision about who is going to run the Olympic Stadium in east London after the Games will not be made before the end of the month.

The is currently talking to companies who have expressed an interest in taking over the stadium after the Games, including football clubs West Ham and Tottenham and entertainment and concert producers AEG and Live Nation.

Tottenham and AEG, who are bidding together, are less keen on keeping an athletics track in the main stadium than West Ham and Live Nation.

So, no decision can be made about the championships until it is decided who is going to run the arena after 2012.

These negotitations are not expected to be concluded until Christmas at the earliest. So the future of the stadium would not have been clear when London was due to present its 2015 bid at the IAAF's council meeting in Monaco on November 19 and 20.

The decision is a blow to London 2012 chairman Seb Coe because he is keen to get an athletics legacy for the stadium.

But a decision on the 2017 championships will be made next year so London will know before the Games if the world event is coming to the capital.