The evening before last and the first hour of yesterday morning were rather taken over by absorbing the news of Spain’s 1:0 victory over Argentina in the World Cup and watching with so much pleasure the joyous moments when players received their medals and finally got their hands on the World Cup itself. I did notice that in the perennial victory photograph of the winning team Donald Trump managed to insert himself into the edge of the picture, not having the sense to realise that the World Cup was about the winers and not about him – I wonder if future photos of this event can be edited so that he is made to disappear from the picture? There are many innovations in this iteration of the World Cup many of which bear an ugly stance of Americanism but there is one innovation which I think is quite healthy. The next World Cup four year’s time will be hosted not by one nation but by a several adjacent nations, namely Spain, Portugal and Morocco. Evidently Spain will be very much the dominant partner in this arrangement and I will, for one, will welcome the European time zone but I do wonder whether the heat of the Iberian peninsular will be rather too hot for the staging of a World Cup? I suppose this can be mitigated by evening kick-offs but the other alternative will be adaptations to the stadia which might prove to be prohibitively expensive and can it be done in time even with four years notice? Now that the World Cup is over, we can return to a more domestic agenda and in response to my enquiry, I received a very full and welcoming email inviting me to the next meeting of the Philosophy group of U3A. This I think I will almost certainly attend on a regular basis for a variety of reasons, not least that the venue is in the training room of one of the local supermarkets in which by definition, there is plenty of free and easily accessible parking and the group very conveniently meets on a Friday (the last of each month) and has an attendance fee of 50p a session. I informed the convenor that I had no formal training in Philosophy (which is not a precondition) but on reflection, I think this is not entirely true. Desperate to get some GCE ‘A’levels, I actually did choose to study a course in Logic in which I attended no classes but did purchase a series of duplicated notes from a correspondence college called Wolsey Hall College, Oxford. The syllabus was reassuring very short and I did study one of those ‘Teach yourself’ books on the subject. In brief, I enjoyed this course tremendously and found the content of the course very useful in my later academic life and actually achieved a grade ‘B’ in the subject so suppose I can say, upon reflection, that I have received some systematic instruction in one of the constituent branches of philosophy. Also, having been in a department of Public Administration for much of my academic life, I have inevitably been exposed to some of the classic arguments of political philosophy (including, of course, Marx) and have been well immersed in the deep debates over the logical basis of scientific discovery in which I have always been deeply interested and incorporated into the courses that I taught in Research Methods within the social sciences. So despite my telling the convenor of the group that I had no formal training in philosophy, this is true of the major branches of the subject but I have been exposed to some of its constituent parts. I need also to have a good look around in my bookshelves to see if I can locate the book called ‘Sophies’s World’ which was a cult book in the 1970’s and was written as a primer for 14 year old Norwegian schoolchildren (a project which one could never date to attempt in the British educational system by the way). This will bring my U3A membership of groups to four on top of which there are monthly coach excursions to nearby places of interest so I think will probably stop joining more groups at this point for fear of over-committing myself.
The day has been spent quietly but I did spend a little amount of time locating some of the philosophy books I have on my shelves, locating the one wanted to re-read most of all (‘Sophie’s World’) and ordering a couple of cut-price introduction to philosophy guides at the same time. We have witnessed the smooth transition of power from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham who has become the UK’s seventh Prime Minister in 10 years. In an interview in Downing Street and before entering No. 10 for the first time as PM, Andy Burnham announced that his first act was to put into place measures that would ensure that homeless people sleeping rough on the streets of our cities would be removed, presumably to appropriate accommodation. This sound an interesting first policy to announce and I think it has been done before. At Christmastime, there is often and concerted effort to provide accommodation to the homeless over the Christmas period, not least because of charities such as ‘Crisis at Christmas’ Also, if my memory serves me correctly, at the outbreak of the COVID epidemic, the homeless were offered accommodation to get them off the streets and to assist the policies designed to stop the spread of infection so if we could offer accommodation to the homeless on a short-term basis, we know it should be possible to organise a scheme on a more permanent basis, whatever the cost. We are promised the publication of a ten-year plan to act as a sort of ‘political reset’ for the country and this should settle some of the policies of the newly reconstituted government. Also, of course, we should expect the announcement of the new cabinet but this may take a day or so and normally involves would-be ministers walking the length of Downing Street but saying nothing until a formal statement is issued. It does happen, of course, that would-be ministers are offered one portfolio but either turn it down or bargain for another one so the construction of a new cabinet is a little akin to the completion of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, prime ministers (such as Margaret Thatcher) use this as a technique to reward supporters and to banish opponents but Andy Burnham may be trying a balancing act to represent leanings of left and right in the Labour party as well as considering both regional representations as well as keeping Wales and Scotland on side, so this is never an easy task.