I don’t mean to sneer, but which is more important: equality or inclusion?

Like a good many of you, I imagine, I was worried that hosting the 2012 Olympic Games in London might send out the wrong sort of message, especially to our young people. The games have traditionally been an appallingly elitist and singularly competitive tournament of a somewhat exclusive nature. Certain people, unfairly selected on the shallow basis of their physical prowess, run, jump and throw things and the people who do best are rewarded while those who do poorly are labelled failures. This is regrettably true even of the more recent Paralympic Games, where the noble aspiration of making crippled people feel valued is undermined by the process of forcing them to compete against one another and awarding the ‘best’ competitors medals (with their distasteful military connotations).

But things are changing, thankfully. It is not just that for the first time the Paralympic Games now has equal billing to the Olympic Games (the lessons of positive discrimination suggest it should really have top billing, of course).