I have just read an article by the Prime Minister in the Telegraph. In it she talks passionately about the gender pay gap. She even ends her article by saying:

"It seems extraordinary to us that women 100 years ago were not only denied the right to vote but had to fight so hard for it. It is our job to make sure that it doesn’t take another 100 years for the gender pay gap to become a thing of the past."

After the Prime Minister's statement to the House of Commons regarding Russia, Dr Julian Lewis MP, chair of the Defence Committee and a member of The Freedom Association, asked the following question:

"No reasonable person can possibly doubt that the Russian Government have behaved with arrogance, inhumanity and contempt, not least in failing to respond to the Prime Minister’s deadline, which they surely would have done if they had known that they were innocent of this charge. In welcoming the Prime Minister’s expulsion of 23 diplomats who are really intelligence agents, may I ask her to make it clear that any retaliation in kind by the Russian Government will be met by further expulsions, perhaps including even of the ambassador, who spends so much time coming to talk to us in this place, bemoaning the poor state of Anglo-Russian relations? Does she accept that Russia traditionally respects strength and despises weakness, and that the time has come to recognise that 2% of GDP is not enough to spend on defence when we are reverting to the sort of adversarial relationship that we had when we spent a much higher proportion of GDP on ensuring that this country was well defended?"

At Prime Minister's Questions today, Freedom Association Council member Phillip Davies MP asked Theresa May the following question:

"Last year, I attended a meeting in the House of Lords organised by the wonderful Cross-Bench peer and human rights campaigner Baroness Cox, at which three very brave women told us their harrowing tales of how they had been treated and discriminated against by sharia councils. It is amazing how noisy feminists in this place are so quiet about this issue, given that women are being discriminated against so blatantly in this country. Is it not time that this alternative, discriminatory form of justice was no longer tolerated in this country?"

During a far-reaching speech delivered at a security conference in Germany over the weekend, the Prime Minister restated her belief that the UK should remain part of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) after leaving the EU.

In doing so, the EAW could be included as part of a trade deal with the EU. If this happens, Rory Broomfield argues that it would be a bad deal. 

I have heard many of Theresa May's speeches since she became Prime Minister. Too many. I generally don't take much notice of them as usually are just words with little action. And May certainly comes out with plenty of words, but today there was a whiff of Martin Luther King Jr. 

"I have a dream that a middle class girl from a private school will be able to get a technical education and not feel that she is being forced to go to university. I have a dream that a poor boy from Derby will one day become a judge". She didn't quite phrase it in that way, but that was one of the messages that she was trying to get across in her speech this afternoon.  

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.

I use an acid test when judging cabinet ministers. Would they have served in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet? Margaret Thatcher always surrounded herself with competent ministers, and those who were found wanting didn’t remain in office for very long. She hated sycophancy, and she would not have tolerated a cabinet colleague pleading for their job for an hour and a half during a ministerial reshuffle.

Although I do not believe that Margaret Thatcher would have wanted to move Jeremy Hunt from his position. He has faced down the unions and defends the NHS to the hilt. He may not be a card carrying Freedom Association member, but he’s not a Remoaner; he’s not trying to derail Brexit and he is a highly intelligent man. A cabinet full of Jeremy Hunt’s would not be my cup of tea, but compared to the current batch, it would be an improvement.

Responding to Theresa May's Government reshuffle, Andrew Allison, Head of Campaigns at The Freedom Association, said:

"After yesterday's onmishambles of a cabinet reshuffle, the Prime Minister will have been hoping for better headlines today as she reshuffled her junior ministerial team. I doubt she'll get any. 

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

 “A creeping sense of hostility to business” has taken hold in the Conservative party, says George Freeman, former head of Downing Street’s policy unit. This hostility is not “creeping,” George; under Mrs May it is galloping. Last Saturday the prime minister denounced “the unacceptable face of capitalism.” I suppose her statement was a follow-up to her disastrous election manifesto which a commentator at the time described as “somewhat to the left of Ed Miliband’s.” No wonder she lost her party’s majority when she began the campaign by alienating her core supporters. Alas we now have not only an extreme socialist opposition in this country; we also have a socialist government.

This is a guest post by Harry Clynch, an English undergraduate at Cambridge University, and an officer of the Cambridge University Conservative Association. 

The general election was a complete travesty for the Conservative Party. Through a grossly incompetent campaign, the Prime Minister managed to squander a twenty-point lead to put the most dangerous Labour leader in the party’s history within inches of Downing Street.

Of course, identity politics was a factor in this. Mrs May’s rather robotic approach to the election, and the symbolic damage done by such things as her refusal to partake in the televised debates, and her U-turn on what was already a flawed policy regarding social care (only exacerbated by her refusal to admit it even was a U-turn), always created the sense and atmosphere that the Conservatives were constantly trying to repair damage rather than guiding effortlessly towards a majority government, let along the huge Commons majority that some initially predicted.