Steven Spielberg has withdrawn as artistic director of the Beijing Olympics because his hosts have not done enough to end the continuing human suffering in Sudan. Makes you wonder when he signed up, really, considering that the banishment of misery is so high on his agenda.

It must have been in that window of opportunity when the Chinese Government stopped executing citizens in the thousands and imprisoning lawyers, journalists and other advocates of human rights. Maybe it was during the time the Government no longer used torture on dissidents, including heavy beatings, electric shocks to the genitals and the forced injection of hot pepper, gasoline and ginger into the nose. No doubt it was not around November, when a deputy minister announced that the majority of transplanted organs now came from prisoners executed by lethal injection, making state-sponsored death quite a lucrative business.

Still, better late than never, the latter being the approximate timescale for a similar stance to be adopted in lickspittle Britain, where Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, the British Olympic Association and Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, combine in a show of self-serving supplication at the feet of one of the most wicked regimes on the planet. While acknowledging that there are wholly unacceptable aspects of Chinese policy - which is more than Mr Livingstone did on a visit there in 2006 when he compared the Tiananmen Square massacre (estimated death toll: between 800 and 3,000, depending on source) to London's poll tax riots (confirmed death toll, all sources: none) - Ms Jowell said that a call for a Beijing Games boycott would serve no purpose and would be a great pity.

What she meant was that if big Western countries began pulling out of the 2008 Games for political reasons, there would almost certainly be a tit-for-tat reaction from the East in 2012 when the event hits London, meaning that we will have spent £9.3 billion to welcome only half the world, plus assorted drug offenders (including a few of our own).

News of Spielberg's abandonment did not go over big in China, but then not much does unless it is authorised by the State. Human Rights Watch says that as the Games draw closer there has been a “systematic effort to silence, suppress and repress Chinese citizens; Beijing has given virtually no signs that is intends to keep promises made to the international community in exchange for hosting the Games”. This makes the motivation for Spielberg's decision even more ironic, considering he chose not the treatment of the Chinese people by a brutal, totalitarian government but flawed Chinese foreign policy as his reason for resigning an artistic post.

China imports two thirds of its oil from Sudan, and exports weapons to the region where 200,000 people are believed to have been killed in five year by government-backed militias. Who would have thought it? A wealthy, powerful country putting its oil interests above political principle and selling weapons to a morally corrupt regime to sweeten the deal. Using this logic, we await Spielberg's resignation from the film industry of America with interest.

Those that are of the opinion that governments fall pretty much into two categories, liars and murderers, can usually find a reason for pulling out of just about any sporting event (as well as much of the fruit and vegetable aisle at Sainsbury's), but there is a third way, somewhere between taking your ball and going home, and giving the thumbs up to a leader who has 30 journalists and 50 internet users locked up.

This third way is to eschew the very British need to be polite to our hosts, particularly when this desire is stimulated by some pretty base motives. “If China sees London as its base in the West then this city's future will be secure,” said the noted friend of freedom, Mr Livingstone, in January 2006, a belief he confirmed in The Guardian four months later: “China's growth has lifted the living standards of millions of people more quickly than any society in history.” Those it hasn't executed, imprisoned, tortured or put under house arrest, presumably.

That the current furore comes after the BOA had insisted on a gagging order for its athletes, preventing comment on any politically sensitive issues - although this was subsequently revised in slightly softer tones when the news broke in a Sunday newspaper, causing embarrassment - is particularly choice. Since the weekend, two high-profile British Olympic athletes - the No1 badminton player, Richard Vaughan, and the bob skeleton slider Shelley Rudman, Britain's only medal winner at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin - have announced their membership of Team Darfur, a pressure group of athletes who intend to use the Games as leverage to persuade China to act over the Sudan crisis. Team Darfur claims to have 205 members, including another eight Britons as yet unidentified. The plot is to speak out at press conferences or take a stance on the winners' podium. Even if the BOA succeeds in silencing Vaughan, no contracts on team membership will be signed until the summer, so he has a six-month run at freedom of speech.

Despicable, isn't it, that instead of using the pressure of the Games as a force for good in China, we are instead mimicking its worst qualities by suppressing the rights of the individual? When Dwain Chambers, a known drug cheat who has recently completed a two-year ban, ran a time good enough to qualify to represent Great Britain at the world indoor championships next month, UK Athletics claimed its hands were tied over his selection, because it feared legal action if he was not picked. Yet on criticism of China, we feel empowered to make a stand.

Everything, as ever, comes down to money. It would not occur to those at UK Athletics to challenge Chambers to see them in court; to do what was right ahead of what was financially prudent, just as it is beyond the comprehension of the organisers of the 2012 Games, from politicians to administrators, to make a stand, to speak out for those that have no voice.

Spielberg promised the most emotional opening ceremony ever: maybe he should have stayed on and set it against a backdrop of a guy with electrodes on his testicles. After all, you won't get more emotion than that.

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