The UK Independence Party members of the London Assembly have formally withdrawn their support for the London bid for the 2012 Olympics and have declared that they support the Paris 2012 bid. They have announced they will only re-consider if the Government promises a referendum for Londoners. Damian Hockney, Leader of the UKIP Group in the Assembly, said yesterday: "If the government wants Londoners to pay for the Olympics in London, there must be a referendum".

With the costly Athens games playing to empty seats and a huge drop in tourism in Greece, UKIP at the Assembly thinks the time is not right for London's bid. Every recent host city has been virtually bankrupted by the Olympics. Montreal is still paying off its debts from the 1976 Games. Now Mayor Ken Livingstone says he wants to spend £10 million of public money every year just to keep unwanted venues open after the Games. Isn't one Millennium Dome fiasco enough?

The party caused a sensation at City Hall when it unfurled a giant banner promoting the Paris bid.

Adds Hockney: "With deepest respect to those organising the London bid, they appear to be suffering from delusion on an Olympian scale. They say that the cost will be £3 billion. Athens is reckoned to have spent anything between £5 billion and £9 billion on the Olympics, several times over budget, threatening the financial stability of the city and spiralling the nation's deficit. Our politicians have been responsible for the Scottish Parliament fiasco (10 times over budget) and the mouldering Dome. Can anyone trust our politicians to stick to the mythical £3 billion costs eight years hence when even the current Games cost so much more?

This Great Sporting Event will be the Twenty-Year Council Tax Swindle if we do not stop the empire building of the politicians NOW.

Will Tony and Ken tell us the facts, put the figures to the public and let us vote? They will be out of power by 2012. It is the people of London who will suffer the costs and the environmental damage.

NOTES

In the June London Assembly elections, the UK Independence Party won two seats. The Assembly Members (AMs) are Damian Hockney and Peter Hulme Cross.

1. The 1976 Montreal Olympics were so far over budget that the citizens of the City are still paying ? it is estimated that the debt will only be paid off in the financial year 2005-2006. Before the event the Mayor said that "The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby. "The people of London will collectively go a stage further and will have kittens at the financial liabilities after the event" says Damian Hockney.

2. Los Angeles told the IOC that it would not build anything new and ran one of the only Games in recent memory, which did not produce a serious deficit.

3. Much-vaunted infrastructure benefits have never been properly or independently quantified ? they are part of a spin process. Past Olympic Games include venues and housing which has subsequently and quietly been pulled down. The only serious auditing of Olympic Games impact on cities and nations has produced very uneasy and negative reading.

4. If London, New York and Madrid pull out, leaving just Paris, it would leave Paris to do what Los Angeles did in the early 1980s. UKIP at the Assembly believes that French politicians are better at these tactics than British ones, so those who value the future of the Olympic Games would rather Chirac and Co played these cards than leaving them in the hands of Tony, Ken and Sebastian.

5. Environmental damage has been caused on a large scale by pandering to the pampered and cosseted Olympic elite. The bid said: "The environment will not only be protected: It will be improved." However, earlier this month the World Wide Fund for Nature said that "serious and irreversible damage" had been done as a result of the Greek Games. In the bid, Greece promised to protect a precious wetland ? home to 110 species of birds but ended up building an Olympic rowing lake on it, angering environmentalists.

6. It is an outrage that organisers and apologists of the Olympic bid for London have attacked the BBC for proving and pointing out the large-scale corruption within the Olympic Games. It shows what these people think of democracy and accountability and we congratulate Panorama and the BBC for having the guts to run the story.

www Ukip Uncovered