The 2012 Olympics draws to a close today. It has succeeded in charming the vast amount of cynics in Britain who were waiting for it to be a disaster. It has been hard to look anywhere and not see Union Flags fluttering en masse. The constant cacophony of cynicism has now been replaced with a din proclaiming that Britain is once again united.

This argument, poised after a long summer of ‘national celebration’, has three main strands:

1.       That Scottish athletes like Chris Hoy and Andy Murray chose to pose with a Union Flag after winning gold medals – a blow to the nationalism of Scottish pro-independence activists

2.       That immigrant athletes like Mo Farah winning the gold is a major blow to racist groups like the BNP and the EDL.

3.       That this show of national unity washes away the still-present stain of last summer’s England-wide rioting.

The first argument is merely an aesthetic victory for the Better Together campaign – essentially like them wheeling out other celebrities to back their cause, like the pro-independence campaign did at their launch party.

The second two arguments tackle more entrenched problems faced by Britain in the 21^st century. The divide between Scotland and England, flared up since the announcing of the 2014 referendum, is still largely polite, fought as a democratic political argument between a number of centrist parties on the public stage.

The Olympics would face a much bigger task trying to remove racism from British life. In the aftermath of both of Mo Farah’s gold medal people tweet Nick Griffin to ask how he was feeling now that an immigrant was representing Britain on the world stage. Same for the EDL. It’s a strange belief, the one the racism only exists within the confines of the members of a few fringe political groups. It ignores the entire racial structures of society, and this argument is like saying patriarchy has been finished off because women are now allowed to box. The Daily Mail, which contains more racist influence than the BNO could ever wish for, still campaigns against what they call ‘plastic Brits’ – athletes who do not sing the national anthem cannot, in their view, really be British.

Similarly, the same racist structures, as well as class structures, which led to the 2011 riots still exist. An Olympic village does little to remove this – if anything, the lavish spending so close to deprivation will increase the anger felt by thousands of people in London and beyond. The Olympics does present an opportunity to use sport as a way to help people, but this could only be achieved with a long, sustained effort that is highly unlikely in an age of austerity (no matter what David Cameron has said in the last few days). In Brazil football is seen as a way to lift people out of poverty from the favelas, but when this, on the scale of poverty in these areas, hardly make a difference. People need more than a sports centre to help them.

The ‘real Britain’ that has been talked about so much – the one sans inequality – is an interesting media construct and nothing more. Like the Olympic village itself, Britain managed to close itself off to everything around it. The Olympics made Britain great again, and it ignored everything else. In the week before the Olympics the IRA announced that they would be continuing their armed campaign for a one-state Ireland. Perhaps the biggest threat to the current form of the UK in modern times, this was all but ignored in the media, save for a few Guardian articles on one day only.

Modern Britain has problems – every nation does – and it’s attempt to further ignore these with the Olympics is actually quite dangerous. If you genuinely believed that racism had been dealt a serious blow in the last two weeks you probably wouldn’t take much notice of slow assimilation in society of racist thoughts.