The English rugby team lost to Australia the other day (it wasn’t that close) and will not advance in the Rugby World Cup. I think this is the first time that a host country has not gotten out of the group stage. This is, of course, deeply humiliating to the English team, who seemed to me to lack the quickness and cleverness in passing that the good teams have. Wales is moving on and Scotland and Ireland might. It also has to be a blow to pubs and the entertainment economy in general, which has invested a lot of money in publicizing the World Cup and showing all of the games every night. With England out, I assume that interest will wane and a great deal of money in beer will not be drunk. There is also a whole social element to this. Rugby is apparently a game of the upper class, played at private schools (it is telling that the most notable Rugby Union fan is Prince Harry) and the Rugby powers that be hoped that a good run by the English Rugby team would create long-term good will and fans among the lower classes. I suspect that they may have spent too much time watching the Matt Damon movie “Invictus” since I think those class distinctions run pretty deep and the idea that rugby could ever challenge soccer (football here) in popularity probably had as much chance as baseball challenging cricket, but regardless, that plan has gone down the gurgler.

Boris Johnson is the extremely colorful Mayor of London (not the Lord Mayor of the City of London, but the real Mayor of the whole thing). Jon Stewart loved him and he was a guest a number of times on The Daily Show. He has been Mayor since 2008 and will not be running for reelection next year. He is a controversial and somewhat divisive figure, so I ‘m not sure if he has worn out his welcome or is just sick of it. It should be an interesting election. The Labour Party has nominated Sadiq Kahn, the son of a Pakistani bus driver who was raised in a council estate (public housing), a former human rights lawyer and a practicing Muslim. Meanwhile, the conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, is actually a billionaire (yes with a “b” and in pounds). However, does not seem to be a clueless rich guy in the Mitt Romney mode and is actually at the leftish wing of the Torries, which I suppose makes him more plausible as a candidate. It could end up to be an election about class divisions. There are going to be a bunch of other candidates, including the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats, but the voting system here has you vote for multiple candidates and rating them in preference, which works against a recount. Since London’s Council has recently switched from Conservative to Labour, you’d have to figure that Kahn is the favorite at this point.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the potential collapse of the Northern Ireland government because the Protestants and Catholics seemed to remember that they all hate each other. Today, there is an article about it on the Op-Ed page of the NY Times (at least I think it’s the Op-Ed page–it’s hard to tell in the digital version). It is a longer explanation of what is going on, but amounts to the same analysis, except it says that they never really stopped hating each other.

Somewhere back there I also wrote about going to the Unitarian Congregation on Newington Green. I’ve met with the Minister, trying to see what I can do to help them. What I’ve learned is that the culture here is very different. Unlike the US, this simply not a religious country. Polls show only 6% of the populace goes to church and those are mainly the elderly and immigrants. So how do you attract people to Unitarianism when the idea of practicing religion isn’t even on their radar screen? The idea that one’s children need to have some level of religious education, which is certainly a major factor underlying UU membership in the states, simply has no real relevance here. It certainly makes one wonder why this has happened, whether you regard religion as an opiate of the masses or as a valuable provider of community, social action and faith. Could it be that the Anglican Church, centered on the monarch, lost its reason for being and philosophical underpinnings as the monarch becomes an essentially irrelevant figurehead and tourist attraction? Or perhaps it is the agony of going through two World Wars, in an up close and personal way that America was spared, followed by the brutality of Thatcherism, had some deep-seated impact on the British psyche? Or is there a long-standing tradition of the acceptance of scientific thought here (unlike in the US) that leads to a cynicism about religion in general?