Britons, currently struggling with rising prices, also have to cope with tax hikes and unprecedented cuts in public spending as the Conservative-led government attempts to cut a record budget deficit.
Data on Tuesday showed the economy grew just 0.2 percent in the second quarter of this year after effectively flatlining in the previous six months.
Politicians from the left and right said the Olympics, largely paid for by the British taxpayer, had been a shot in the arm for the economy.
“I think the Games have been good for London, good for Britain and they actually have been a great thing to stage during tough economic times and I’m very glad we did,” Johnson told Reuters, as he attended events to mark the completion of the 269 million pound aquatics center.
“If you want my view, to invest in infrastructure, in London, in transport infrastructure, to mobilize people into work to lay the foundations for long-term competitiveness, is just common sense.”
Billions of pounds have been invested in a previously neglected and run-down part of east London, including an upgrade to its rail links, and the promise of 11,000 new homes.
The new 1.5 billion pound Stratford City with its huge Westfield shopping mall, the biggest of its kind in Europe, is expected to create 15,000 jobs, on top of the 40,000 construction jobs on the Olympic Park.
When London successfully bid to host the 2012 Olympics six years ago, the Labour Party was in power and times were relatively prosperous.
Since then, the financial crash has battered the country’s finances, and Labour has been replaced by a Conservative-led coalition that looks to the private sector to provide growth.
Labour has called for a slower pace of deficit cuts.
“If we had to do it (the Olympics) again, I would say ‘yes’, absolutely every time. This is exactly the right counter-cyclical thing to do during tough times,” Johnson told reporters.
The Conservative mayor, who faces a re-election battle next year, said he would go and watch the Games with “great pride and excitement” if he fails to win.
“People are very excited about the Games, it’s one of the things that is keeping the country going, has kept the country going, through the recession.
“By next year when with any luck things will be looking a bit brighter on the economic front, I think people will be very much in a mood to celebrate.”
Tessa Jowell, Labour’s Olympics spokeswoman, commissioned Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid to design the aquatics center with its sting-ray shaped roof when she was the Olympics minister.
Standing beside the 50-meter pool, she described the Olympics as “economic gold at a time of economic need,” saying it had kept people in work who might otherwise have been laid off, and provided British business with billions of pounds of contracts.
“I think actually you cannot load too much on an Olympics, an Olympics is not of its own an engine for recovery,” she told Reuters.
“But I think what we have demonstrated beyond doubt to the International Olympic Committee is that we can make an Olympics work very hard to achieve broader purposes beyond sport.
“And at a time when countries around the world are looking at whether these major global events are affordable I think we have blazed a very important trail.”
