The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. Peter is reflecting on last Saturday's Today programme. 

I switch on Radio Four just before seven o’clock in the morning for the weather forecast, listen to the news headlines and then turn off before the relentless barrage of propaganda from the lefty clones who present The Today Programme has chance to reduce me to a gibbering wreck. But this morning I was late and, by the time I’d switched on, Britain’s very own version of Pravda was in full swing.

They were discussing this weekend’s election in Hungary in which Prime Minister Victor Orban is seeking another term.

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

Fifty-one – and counting - people murdered in London since the beginning of the year. The Metropolitan Police must be very concerned. But Commissioner Cressida Dick insists, “This is a horrible, horrible spate of deaths but there is no crisis.”

What would be a crisis Ms Dick – a hundred deaths, two hundred? Well, you’re in charge, so what do you intend to do about it? She answers: “We need to reduce the number, particularly the number of young people, who are dying in street attacks.”

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

Is British criminal justice truly just? If it were, it would operate impartially without fear or favour and its only bias being in favour of the facts. But this is not what happens. Frequently the innocent are punished and the guilty go free.

This should not happen. The matter of the fair operation of the judicial process was sorted out centuries before the birth of Christ in the opening chapters of Plato’s Republic. Here, in an argument with Polymarchus, Glaucon and Thrasymachus, Socrates describes what true justice is and how it should operate: “for the maintenance of harmony in the city.” Harmony is not served where virtue is penalised and vice rewarded, where the innocent are punished and the guilty set free.

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

It doesn’t matter how fatuous some ideas might be, they can never be killed off – quite – by rational argument. They remain impervious even to lorry loads of satire and ridicule. Let me tell you a true story about one such idea…

Ten years ago there was a sensational court case all over the papers. A man aged twenty-two killed his parents, stole all their money – about £20,000 – and cleared off to New York with his girlfriend where they proceeded to live the life of Riley. Well, they were caught and the young man was put on trial for his parents’ murder, but he was acquitted because a psychiatrist declared him to be “suffering from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).”

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece which I titled “The Guardian: a psychiatric casebook.” In the light of new clinical information I need to revise the judgement I made there. I originally thought the mental disease which The Guardian is suffering from is some form of neurosis. It turns out to be much worse – a full-blown psychotic illness. You know the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic? The neurotic builds castles in the air while the psychotic lives in them.

Young Owen Jones is the psychotic in question. He has written an article in The Guardian which qualifies him for immediate transportation to the nuthouse.

It’s lovely when it’s one of theirs, isn’t it? A sexual predator, that is. It seems so often it’s one of ours. By ours I mean priests, freemasons, Tory MPs from the shires and such like. By theirs I mean the worldwide community of institutionalised do-gooders – specifically Oxfam.

Now, let me give credit where credit is due. This morning on The Today Programme Justin Webb and John Humphrys were reading out the newspaper headlines. Webb said, “The Oxfam sexual abuse scandal is the lead for them all – even The Guardian which had not previously reported this story with much enthusiasm.”

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

Does the Foreign Office believe in freedom?

Senior civil servants in the FO have asked their staff to wear Islamic headscarves for a day because, they claim, the headscarf – commonly called the hijab or khimaar - symbolises “liberation, respect and security.” Hijab means a barrier and one might question how the veiling of a woman behind a barrier leads to her liberation. Many women in Iran certainly don’t think the hijab is liberating and, while women in our Foreign Office were wearing the veil for World Hijab Day, Iranian women were risking imprisonment and worse by removing their hijabs in public as a protest against “the institutionalised oppression of women.”

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

Manchester Art Gallery has removed a pre-Raphaelite painting which depicts naked water nymphs seducing a man. Hylas and the Nymphs, painted by John William Waterhouse in 1896 is a famous Victorian painting, but its erotic content - combined with the rise of the #Metoo movement and the recent expose of the President's Club - has prompted curators to take the artwork down.

A statement on the gallery's website said they removed the painting, "To prompt conversation about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester’s public collection."

"This gallery presents the female body as either a ‘passive decorative form’ or a ‘femme fatale.’ Let’s challenge this Victorian fantasy!"

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

The writing has been on the wall for Theresa May for a long time. And the words form the same judgement that was delivered to Belshazzar, as recorded in Daniel 5:25: Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting. 

Mrs May, the most useless home secretary and the most incompetent prime minister we’ve had since Methuselah was a boy, is clearly at the end of her tether. She is fragile and histrionic. She cried on election night when it was borne in on her that she is so pathetic she couldn’t even see off Jeremy Corbyn. In the Brexit negotiations she appeared schizoid and frantic. She talked tough for ten minutes, then wept and pleaded. Naturally, her tormentors the apparatchiks Juncker and Barnier – and of course Monsieur le-vanity-case Macron and Frau Fuhrer – played on May’s mood swivels to perfection. They kissed, cuddled, flattered and cajoled her, then they shouted and threatened  Their enjoyment of her tortured hopelessness was excruciating to watch. She conceded their every demand and called it her triumph.

The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

I’m not starry-eyed about the British newspapers. How could I be when I’ve read them and written for them all my working life? If ever I harboured any illusions, these were quickly dispelled back in the late 1980s when I was lucky enough to land myself a proper job in Fleet Street. Sir David English gave me a freelance contract on the Daily Mail to write op-ed pieces, travel articles and book reviews. And it really was Fleet Street in those days: the Daily Mail building was two minutes’ walk from St Bride’s, the wedding cake church so named after its unusual tower. I had a grand old time. I joined Scribes’ journalists’ drinking club and spent hours in The Cheshire Cheese,once a favourite watering-hole of Dr Johnson,  where I talked Old Leeds with Keith Waterhouse and cricket with Ian Wooldridge. I interviewed Daniel Barenboim in Munich and John Arlott in Alderney and I had dinner with Anthony Burgess and his wife in the West End. The first feature I was asked to write was about the Lockerbie disaster.