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

Theresa May is very angry with Prince Harry. There was the great lady – Theresa, I mean, not Harry’s intended – with more press releases than she has pairs of shoes. For yesterday was to mark the launch of the government’s Grand Industrial Strategy: to give it its full title, The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. Acres of newsprint had been set aside for the publication of details of this great national plan. I nearly wrote Five Year Plan, after the manner of the former Soviet Union. But Theresa is far more ambitious than Joseph Stalin and her strategy looks forward as far as 2040. Television and radio schedules were cleared in advance for exciting ministerial appearances. Then, wouldn’t you just know it: the Prince and his Yankee girlfriend – “I’m just wild about Harry” – are the only news in town. Surely Theresa must be our unluckiest prime minister: first she loses a general election which even a pussycat would have won; then she cocks up the Tory conference with a coughing fit; and now her big strategic launch lies smothered under a pile of royal fluff.

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

The housing crisis is both acute and chronic. Why?

Local councils are partly to blame: for decades they have not increased the supply of council houses, while their deliberately complicated approval procedures obstruct private building companies.

Iniquitous stamp duty doesn’t help and neither does buy-to-let.

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

Theresa May’s brand of conservatism has been called “socialism lite.” This is unfair to her. Perhaps it used to be socialism lite, but it now shows every sign of turning into socialism ‘evvy.

The latest wheeze takes the form of a bribe as the Tories hope to grab the young voters by offering cheaper rail travel. But this is only a gimmick, a sideshow. Across the whole range of economic policies, the government looks increasingly left wing: not far off Miliband’s 2015 election manifesto and certainly well to the left of anything produced by Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s.

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

As we all know, we have the great blessing of comprehensive freedom of speech in this country – but not if you wish to protest peacefully about mass murder.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has said he favours the banning of pro-life vigils outside abortion clinics. 113 MPs agree with him and they aim to set up “buffer zones” outside the clinics to prevent these protests. Already, two local authorities in England – Ealing and Portsmouth - have voted to ban these vigils by using public space protection orders (PSPO), which allow local authorities to criminalise behaviour not normally considered criminal.

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

Relentlessly, day by day, the surveillance society is becoming more total – the word I am looking for is totalitarian

Last Saturday I was invited by the Church of England authorities to attend what is called a Safeguarding Course. If I had declined this “invitation,” I would have no longer possessed my work permit: the Bishop’s permission for me to officiate as a priest. So, along with thirty other priests and laypeople, I endured a couple of hours brainwashing session in which I was told to look out for incidences of “physical, mental, sexual or emotional abuse of children or adults.” Suggestions were offered as to how I might go about this. I should, for example, listen to children’s conversation from which I might glean some insight into their home life.

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

The BBC is in festive mode as it celebrates the centenary of Bolshevik Revolution. Laurie Taylor was at it again yesterday on Thinking Aloud. How can all the pundits fly in the face of all the evidence and suggest that the Communist Revolution was anything but a catastrophe? The reign of terror began immediately under Lenin and, by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, anything between 40-60 million of their countrymen had been slaughtered in the purges and genocides. Apologists for Communism claim that it was a beautiful idea corrupted by the lust for power of the dictators. Eric Hobsbawn, an historian garlanded with the Order of Merit, said that all the millions of deaths under Stalin would have been a price worth paying if the great Communist experiment had delivered the goods. How could it? The only results of Soviet Communism – or Chinese Communism for that matter – were famine, terror and death. But let us go further back and look at the founders of Communism, Marx and Engels, and see if we can find anything in these two to admire.

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

There was a spectacular sunrise over the sea this morning in Eastbourne, so I got out of bed early and, with as much cheerfulness as I could muster, prepared myself for another day in the asylum. It’s getting so you daren’t open the newspaper or switch on the BBC propaganda machine for fear of cracking up completely and running out into the street shouting, screaming and foaming at the mouth.

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

Miguel Rodríguez Torres, a Venezuelan general who served as President Maduro’s interior minister in 2013 and 2014, has warned that his country is on the verge of civil war. Large riots and protests have intensified in every major city, including the working class neighborhoods which once firmly supported Maduro’s government.