I awoke yesterday to a rather gloomy day which is a change after the severe hear experienced last week – it looks as though these conditions are to prevail for most of the day but temperatures hovering at about 21\u00b0 for most of the morning. There is going to be a major political speech by Andy Burnham later in the day where the probable next Prime Minister will lay out his vision for the future. Most incoming occupants of No 10 like to be remembered for one huge policy and I remember that in the case of John Major, who succeeded Margaret Thatcher, it was the ‘Citizen’s Charter’ to be followed by the ‘Patient’s Charter’. and in Andy Burnham’s case, it is to create a ‘No 10 in the North’ accompanied by a concomitant commitment to devolve many much more decision making to the regions and to city mayors. Of course, we shall have to wait and see what is actually being proposed and, as is often said, the ‘devil is in the detail’ I expect that the London and metropolitan elite may give this whole plan at best only a lukewarm reception as it may spell out the transfer of power and money from some of the richer to some of the poorer regions of the UK. Whether this transfer of ‘Manchesterism’ as it has been dubbed will be very successful is quite another question. The Boris Johnson government tried to create a ‘Department of Levelling Up’ and whether much was achieved as a consequence it is for the economic historians of the future to decide. I suspect that the Boris Johnson initiative did curb and mitigate the increasing power and influence of the more prosperous South East of the UK without actually reversing any of the trends and hence the Reform party could tap into the discontent felt by many of the regions left behind. I think it is true to say that on the few occasions I have journeyed to London in recent years I have felt that I am entering a somewhat different country such is the disconnect between the generally prosperous capital and the rest of the country. In this respect, I often think of the Crossrail project which attracted hardly any public attention whereas HS2 linking the capital with the Midlands and the North only made it as far as Birmingham. Crossrail, or the Elizabeth line as it is widely known, is the newest railway through the UK capital. With London’s population set to reach 10 million by 2030, it is\u2019 designed to improve a public transport system already struggling to cope. The railway was once the biggest infrastructure project in Europe. It took 14 years to build and measures 118km long and includes 42km of track in new tunnels under London. It connects the city of Reading in Berkshire and Heathrow airport in west London, to Abbey Wood in south London and Shenfield in Essex. Linking 40 stations \u2013 10 of them new \u2013 the line provided the biggest increase in central London\u2019s train capacity ever delivered by a single engineering project. It is expected to see 200 million passenger journeys every year and the central section opened on 24 May 2022. The week in prospect is rather a ‘non-week’ for me as I have no U3A activities in prospect but of course the week marks the end of June and the start of July or the second half of the year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have developed a theory about the performance of the England football team which I am trying to validate by asking friends and acquaintances a simple question. My theory is that the England game is so dominated by strikes (i.e. goals) and strikers that all of the prestige and rewards of the game are focused on the strikers and not the defenders. Hence, we do not have, or even develop, talents in defence which is why the England team appears so vulnerable. The Ghana game was a case in point because their whole game is structured around defence and one saw because when an England players received a pass, he was immediately surrounded by about four Ghanaian players and hence there was no way through. So when the England backs are under pressure, the commentators would argue that one of the English strikers might drop back in defence whereas for the Ghana team it is not the odd striker called into defence but the whole of the team To validate my theory, I asked my chiropodist who called around today and whose level of interest in the game probably matches mine if she could name some of the English strikers. She immediately came up with a list of three but when I asked for similar names providing the England defence, she could not name a single defender This absolutely matches my own experience as well and thus it will be rather flukey if the England team make much progress in the later stages of the competition. I lunched on a prawn omelette complemented with some salad left over from the weekend and ate rather late in the day as I was quite absorbed by the Andy Burnham vision of the future, outlined in a major speech in Manchester. The highlights of this were the notion to create a Northern No10 and to transfer some important governmental functions to it. The second pledge was to restore a good level of council house building but I wonder how much of this come to fruition unless a lot of ‘brown’ sites (previously developed land) is utilised rather than green open spaces. In the course of the afternoon, I located the series of documentaries in three parts of the whole of the Suez debacle. Here, the English and French tried to utilise the Israelis to start a phoney war against Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian leader to regain control of the Suez canal. The Americans facing an election did not want to be involved in any foreign ventures so the UK was left with a humiliating climbdown – and lost the services of Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, as a consequence. The whole lesson to be learnt from the Suez debacle is that Britain’s ability to act as an erstwhile colonial power had come to an abrupt end and without support from the rich and powerful Americans we were in effect a ‘toothless tiger’ I had always supposed that this phrase had Chinese origins as indeed it had. The original Chinese idiom\u2014referring to something that appears formidable but is actually weak and ineffectual\u2014was popularised globally in the 1940s and 1950s by Chinese leader Mao Zedong during interviews and political speeches against Western powers. Over time, native English speakers substituted ‘tiger’ into a more menacing, predatory metaphor (toothless tiger) to describe an organisation, law, or threat that lacks the ability to inflict harm or enforce its rules. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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