When I heard that Mother Theresa had called a snap election, or rather had asked Parliament to agree to one, I instantly calculated that this meant an election around the middle of May (no pun intended). Then I heard them say the 8th June, over seven weeks hence. Seven weeks? That's no snap election. An unexpected one, maybe, but 'unexpected' and 'snap' are not the same thing.

You see, I'm old enough to remember real snap elections, when the 'snap' part was not only about the suddenness of it, but also indicated a relatively short campaign. Not that campaigns were ever that long, with usually around four and a half weeks between the announcement of the election and polling day. This was about what it took to wind up the business of the old Parliament and allow three or four weeks of proper campaigning. The first snap election I recall was in 1970, when Harold Wilson called one earlier than he had to after he saw that opinion polls were favourable (of course, he denied at the time that this was the reason, but published memoirs and diaries of his Cabinet colleagues told a different story). There were 31 days between announcement and election, and the campaign proper did not start until parliamentary and other business was out of the way. . The next 'snap' election was the very next one, which Edward Heath  called in February 1974 during the miner's strike (one of several in the 70s and 80s) on a 'who governs Britain?' ticket. Like Wilson's snap election in 1970, it backfired on the one who called it. Not until 2010 did a campaign last as long as five full weeks, and by 2015 it was six. Now we have seven, double what it would have been 25+ years ago.

I presume the lengthening of election campaigns is directly related to the way the modern media operates, with perhaps some contagion from the US, where campaigning is ludicrously long (but they have primaries and all sorts of showbiz frippery). If the extra time added anything to the sum of what we learn about the parties' policies it might be justified, but I'm not sure it does. Either way, I still contend that this is no snap election, and the media pundits who call it that appear to me a bit wet behind the ears and unaware of relatively recent History. Seven weeks is an incredibly long time in politics with enormous potential for gaffes and banana skins. If politicians can't put their case in that time they should be in another job (though most of them should be anyway).

There will, of course, be fibs and misleading generalisations, but what has surprised me most over the years is how some of the same ones are resurrected  election after election. Someone on the Labour side, for example, is bound to say something along the lines that we owe our health service to Labour. The truth is that the National Health Service and other aspects of the welfare state originated in the report of an all-party committee, led by William Beveridge, a Liberal. Both the Labour and Conservative manifestoes in the 1945 election duly promised a health service free at the point of delivery. There were differences in how the service would be run (Labour was for the de facto nationalisation of hospitals and GP practices, while the Conservatives talked of working with and financing existing local trusts), but there was total consensus about the 'free at the point of delivery' part.  Labour won the 1945 election and so were able to deliver.  Yet watch out for the hoary old chestnut from some Labour stalwart about it being Labour's health service which the Tories fought against tooth and nail. On the other side, watch out for the oh-so patriotic stuff from the Conservatives. And, of course, this is the Brexit election, which will almost certainly mean that it will break all records for hyperbole and nonsense. 

   Had I been an American it is highly unlikely that I would have voted for Donald Trump. I support the idea of universal healthcare (though I’m not dogmatic about the state running every last bit of it), I believe the relatively low murder rate in the UK is at least partly to do with our low gun ownership, and I think Trump’ s apparent naivety towards Putin’s Russia could be dangerous, though I hope this might change with experience. What’s more I found that some aspects of his debating style did him little credit. I also voted Remain in the UK’s EU referendum, and it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged (though I consider the comparison a little simplistic and far too general) that the kind of people who voted for Brexit  are broadly the sort who would vote for Trump if they lived in the US.
  It therefore came as a shock to me when I realised that I was not totally displeased with his victory and in one important area he has already done us all a great service: he said things one is not supposed to say and still won. In a world where the concept of freedom of speech has been eroded by a kind of campus consensus, this is no insignificant victory.  Over the last forty years the once intelligent Left and Centre have gradually become more totalitarian on a range of issues, with only one view permitted in ‘progressive’ circles. Worse, they have sought to impose those views on the wider population, supinely allowing bigoted and quite extreme groups to govern our vocabulary and even attempting to alter the meaning of words. This has resulted in an Orwellian atmosphere where perfectly good people are called nasty names if they don’t tow the decreed line. ‘Misogyny’ is the latest abused buzzword, stripped of its original meaning and turned into an all-purpose insult to be used like a scatter-gun. Trump has stuck up two fingers at the little gods who think they are the only ones who can decide such things. For that he deserves our gratitude.  Having said that, I still can’t yet like him much, and I doubt if he would think he has much in common with me, either.
  One reason for this restriction (intended or unintended) on freedom of speech may well be the growth in in the politics of offence. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if those who claim to speak for the offended really did represent them, but often they don’t. I remember when Michael Heseltine haplessly used the word ‘handicapped’ on a BBC programme (itself once considered polite compared to the words that went before. Remember when The Spastics’ Society represented the disabled?). Some very irate people wrote in to complain that nobody had challenged him for saying ‘handicapped’ and not ‘disabled’ which, for the moment, is the word one is supposed to use. I found this complaint bizarre, not least because I work in a hospital where parents still often refer to their children as being handicapped. I know the hospital tends to use ‘disabled’, but it is a preference, not a rule. It’s frightening the way a preference for a word can become a strict rule to be imposed on everyone. Nobody really has the authority to do any such thing. Besides, looking at it logically, ‘handicapped’ is the more benign word. If something is disabled it’s utterly useless, but a handicap is, well, just a handicap.
  In any case it will all change round again in a few years. Those who engage in the politics of offence have to keep changing the ‘correct’ word so that everyone else is always in the wrong. In my lifetime ‘black’ became ‘coloured’, then ‘black’ again, then ‘people of colour’, and recently someone in The Guardian complained all of them were racist and proposed something else again. This will, of course, give the passive-aggressive even more scope to see themselves as saints and everyone else as sinners.  And I’m not even going to start on the words used in gender politics, other than to point out that the decision about words we can and cannot use originated from pressure groups with absolutely no authority to decide any such thing.
  Of course, not everyone is supposed to take offence. As a gay man I’m allowed to, but straight men generally aren’t (unless they want to dress in women's clothes and use ladies' toilets, in which case they too can become a persecuted minority complete with TV and radio interviews and long boring articles in The Guardian). It doesn’t matter too much, as so many of them are now Stepford husbands that they haven’t noticed. But perhaps that’s now changing…
               
I cannot let Armistice Day pass unmarked, so here is a picture of the 'Patriarchy' living the high life.

 Yes, I got the referendum result wrong. I predicted that the thought of a sharp decline in the pound just before the summer holidays would most likely swing it for the Remain side. Of course, I could simply have deleted my previous blog entry and any newcomers would never know I had egg on my face. However, if any blog is to be worth reading it must record humiliations alongside triumphs. 
  Judging from the reports of people regretting their Leave vote now that they have witnessed the predicted sharp decline in the pound and the near collapse of the stock markets, it seems that my mistake was to overestimate the intelligence of some of the Leave voters. 'We didn't know this would happen' some are reported to have complained. They were told, of course, repeatedly, but they chose to believe Batty Boris and Nigel the snake oil salesman instead. There are also some who have said that they were so convinced the Remain side would win anyway that they decided to use their vote as a protest even though they did not actually support the Leave side. A few surveys have suggested the number of regretful Leave voters could range from 4% to 40%. The higher figure is implausible, but even the lower one would have been enough to swing it the other way. 
  Dafter still are the reasons some people gave as to why they used their referendum vote as a 'protest' about other issues, real or imagined. 'This is the first time we've had a say about anything,' some asserted. But hang on a minute, we had a general election last year that had a lower turnout than the referendum, and in many of those areas that voted Leave there is usually a turnout in local elections of around 30% or less. They had a say then but most of them chose not to use it.​
  It just goes to show the dangers of voting (or not voting) frivolously. It reminds me of what happened in France in the 2002 Presidential elections. There are two rounds in French Presidential elections, with the two top candidates in the first round going on to the second. In the first round there were a multitude of mad parties, and many students and leftists thought it would be fun to vote for various Trotskyist, Maoists and others, intending to revert to the official Socialist candidate in the second round  'We're such crazy people' they giggled in that surrealist way of theirs. But the leftist vote was so split that the two top candidates turned out to be Chirac, the Gaullist, and Le Pen, the leader of the far right National Front. So all those leftists then had to vote for  their arch-enemy, Chirac, to keep out Le Pen.
​  And here too people were using their referendum vote for all sorts of other reasons, losing sight of the central issue. Those ‘patriots’ have also probably voted for the break up of the United Kingdom as the Scots and Northern Irish voted to stay in the EU. Unintended consequences abound. There are lessons here both for voters and those who call referendums, especially referendums (yes, I know it should be 'referenda', but that sounds just too pretentious) that were never really necessary in the first place.
  On a slightly brighter note, after voting on Thursday I took it in my head to go into town and buy a portion of the Canadian dollars I’ll need for my holiday in September, just in case Leave won. It turned out to be a good call. At least I've cut my losses to the tune of eighty Canadian dollars (and rising). So a little victory at least! It was not entirely for selfish reasons, because knowing my luck my buying my currency early will guarantee a huge increase in the pound by September. Or maybe not. 
 

  When I decided to move to Ipswich from London nine years ago some people were surprised. While I had lived there before for a few years, that had originally been my parents' rather than my decision. The second time around people could understand my desire to move out of London, but why Suffolk? And why Ipswich, that funny little town at the back of beyond that hardly registered on anyone’s radar? Even the nickname of its football team, ‘the Tractor Boys’, emphasised that it was the only major team with a largely rural fan base, bumpkins in other words. About the only other thing people knew about Ipswich was its dubious honour of having been Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s birthplace, and even in Wolsey’s time, five hundred years ago, it seemed to have been seen as a bit of a joke. ‘Wolsey, the butcher’s son from Ipswich’ was how his enemies described him even before his downfall. That suggested that by rights he should have been pretty low down in the pecking order.
  Yet for some strange reason, even during my earlier sojourn in the town, I thought I detected something others didn’t seem to. I was a History buff, an affliction that has not left me. When I had been in my mid-teens I had gone on a tour of the West Country with my family where we did all the touristy stuff. There every building that looked vaguely old seemed to have been turned into a museum or a snooty tea room. Yet in Ipswich (and Suffolk generally) many of the streets and buildings were older still but they were not given this treatment. People just lived and worked in them and there was hardly a tourist in sight. Some of the medieval buildings had been given a makeover in the Eighteenth Century, the frontages rebuilt in brick and sash windows added (a bit like putting in UPVC double glazing today), but I could see that those overhanging upper storeys gave the game away. Once I’d learned to detect the signs it became apparent just how ancient the town is. Of course, there have long been architectural experts who were in on the truth, but only relatively recently has Ipswich’s antiquity been more widely acknowledged.
  Part of the reason could be that, unlike Norwich, Ipswich does not have a cathedral or a castle. It does however, have a larger collection of medieval churches, one of which (St Lawrence) has the oldest set of working bells in the world. Ipswich’s medieval role was primarily as a port, the largest in the country in the days when the wool trade with the Netherlands and Flanders was all-important. In those days the ports on the eastern side of England mattered more than those on the west, whereas the discovery of the New World was to shift the direction England faced and the likes of Bristol and Liverpool came into their own.
  The wool trade and other links with the Continent meant that there was a lot of cross-fertilisation in cultural and architectural terms. Dutch merchants built houses in Ipswich, English ones in the Hague and Amsterdam, and that influence can still be seen in some of the architecture on both sides of the North Sea. More recently, Ipswich again found itself in the forefront of architectural innovation with the Willis building (formerly Willis, Faber and Dumas). Built in the seventies, this had features that are now commonplace in most of the world’s major cities. The black glass walls and the cascading escalators were the first of their kind. It’s a tiny building compared to its offspring in the likes of New York and London, but it was the mother of them all. It made Sir Norman Foster’s name, so it’s quite conceivable that without Ipswich there would have been no Reichstag (in its rebuilt form) in Berlin!
  

Photos (top): Book shop, Silent Street: Christchurch Mansion; Marina (formerly the docks);
(bottom) The Unitarian Meeting House (1699) with part of Willis Building  behind; 'Ancient House', Buttermarket;
 Interior of Willis building showing first cascading escalators.