petermullen – Page 6 – All Things Considered

05 Nov

If thy ‘ead offend thee, cut it off

The country is terribly short of shrinks.

One in ten consultant psychiatrist posts in England are currently unfilled in the NHS,according to a report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) and the number of unfilled posts has doubled in the past four years.

Wales is also struggling to fill posts, with vacancies of 9%, while Scotland and Northern Ireland have vacancy rates of 6% and 2% respectively.

The college called the vacancies “frankly alarming” Prof Wendy Burn of the RCP, said the shortage means patients might be waiting months to see a psychiatrist, during which time they could be getting worse.

Professor Burn did not consider the distinct possibility that sufferers might get worse if they did see a psychiatrist. If you want to be a plumber, it helps if you’re a practical sort. Priests need to be religious. By the same token, many psychiatrists are more than a little mad.

I read the snooker champion Ronnie O’ Sullivan’s account of how, some years ago, he turned to a Freudian psychiatrist to help him overcome his depressions. Ronnie’s father was doing time for murdering Charlie Kray’s driver. The psychiatrist, having noted that Ronnie sometimes cued left-handed, asked him if his father had stabbed his victim with his left hand. Ronnie’s comment on the psychiatrist’s question was: “It did me ‘ead in.”

There is a century old tradition of Freudian – or, as we say in English, Fraudian – psychiatry. And then between the wars there arose a fashion for Behaviourism. This is a science of the mind which does not think there is such a thing as a mind. So psychiatrists should study our behaviour which is defined exclusively in terms of stimulus and response – the famous S-R relation which the renowned Behaviourist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) employed to teach rats the way out of mazes and pigeons to play table tennis.

(By the way, the “B.F.” stands for Burrhus Frederic – and not what you were thinking).

On this subject, Arthur Koestler commented: “Now that we have lost our souls, gone out of our minds and seem about to lose all consciousness, what is there left for psychologists to study? Professor Skinner’s answer is ‘Rats!’”

Similarly, the philosopher Peter Geach said, mockingly, “A Behaviourist knows he’s hungry when he observes himself running home for his lunch.”

From phenobarbitone – which I once heard mispronounced as “female baritone” – to Prozac, psychiatry has come up with a succession of wonder drugs. We were assured back in the 1960s that the new benzodiazepams such as Librium, Ativan and Valium – “mother’s little helpers” – so you see, it was the women who got to swallow the lion’s share – were without side effects and non-addictive. We now know that millions worldwide have been on these drugs for generations and can’t kick the habit.

Scientific psychiatry brought forth many blessings. There was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – very popular in the 1950s and 1960s – which works by giving patients electric shocks to produce seizures which, it was hoped, might relieve the conditions of depression and mania. The treatment was typically administered to a patient three times a week for several weeks, very commonly to pregnant women and those going through the menopause. 71% of all patients treated with ECT are women. It is still being administered in NHS hospitals. Rosemary, sister to JFK, received this treatment and was incapacitated for the rest of her life. The distinguished New Zealand novelist Janet Frame was among countless others who suffered greatly owing to this procedure.

I suppose the mother and father of all treatments for mental disturbances is the frontal lobe lobotomy, named from two Greek words meaning “brain” and “slice.” The ultimate method, as Ronnie might say, of doin’ yer ‘ead in. Surgeons cut out part of the cortex. Again this is more often performed on women. Its inventor Antonio Muniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for coming up with this little beauty. There is a vigorous campaign to have his award annulled.

Jesus famously quipped, “if thy hand offend thee, cut it off. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” – Mark 9:43ff. The lobotomists have gone one better than the Lord: “If thy head offend thee, cut it off.”

You know, I’m only an uninstructed layman in these matters, but I just wonder if, rather than seek ever more ingenious ways to treat mentally deranged people, it might be better to try to create a saner world?

04 Nov

The Ladies Misbehaving

Michael White is that rare – perhaps unique? – thing: a lefty with a sense of humour. His political articles and sketches in The Guardian have been making me laugh for decades. But this week Michael was not joking.

He was a guest on BBC Radio Four’s The Media Show, hosted by Andrea Catherwood and of course the subject was the “inappropriate behaviour” of the naughty MPs and so many others that Andrea wondered if to our concept of institutional racism we should add institutional sexual misbehaviour. This was when Michael roughly interfered with the feminist, politically-correct prejudices of the BBC.

He said that inappropriate sexual behaviour was not exclusive to men but that “Clever, attractive young women can play the power game too.”

Outrage was swift and violent. Andrea expostulated – which is a polite way of saying she went into full bollocking mode: “D’you mean to say these women are at fault?”

Good grief! Didn’t Michael understand that he was talking on the BBC where it is an article of the severest dogma that women can never be at fault?

No, he didn’t understand or, brave man, he didn’t care. He said, “I’m going further than that. I’m saying women too can be predators.”

He spoke the truth – however unacceptable to the politically-correct establishment. We were given an example only this week of a woman prominent in society exhibiting inappropriate sexual behaviour. Kenneth Branagh reported that Dame Judi Dench had exposed herself to him backstage. Poor Ken, I understand he’s still receiving counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder!

Moreover, Michael didn’t merely speak the truth: he spoke the universal truth that there have always been women sexual predators. I don’t suppose they read the Bible much at the Beeb, but they might make a start with the story of those two randy young tarts the daughters of Lot who got their father drunk and took advantage of him: “And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him” (Genesis 19: 31-32).

Well, if they haven’t read the Bible, surely they have glanced at bits of bawd in Chaucer and Shakespeare – to say nothing of the misconduct of some of the Borgia ladies. I won’t get on to the psychopathic predations of such as Rosemary west and Myra Hindley.

Even nice girls have been known to lay hands unseemly on men and boys

My first job out of school was in a textiles warehouse in Leeds. My bosses wanted me to gain experience and advancement in the trade, so they sent me on a week’s course to the cotton mill in Barrowford, near Nelson in Lancashire. Here I came across a most unladylike custom. When a new lad, aged fifteen, started at the mill, the girls would leave their looms and shuttles, womanhandle him into the ladies and black his balls with boot polish.

I rush to add that I don’t think even Andrea Leadsome in all her fury at Michael Fallon would have bent so low as to smear the former defence secretary’s scrotum with a coating of Cherry Blossom

Quite posh girls have been known to misbehave. In my late teens I worked in the stats office at the Ministry of Labour. In those days before computers, all official letters and documents were typed by young women specially employed for the task. I would be sent down from the third floor to the typing pool on the first floor, there to enter on a scene so intimidating I nearly dropped my documents and ran straight back up the staircase, In the scented haze, thirty or forty miniskirted nubile females sat at desks in ranks. When a man opened the door, the clattering keys would cease and the timorous visitor, if he was a handsome – or even a passable – man would be ogled and whistled at.

At my theological college I quickly learned to heed a word of warning concerning the lecherous assistant cook and housemaid, “Don’t let yourself get talked into shelling peas with Celia!”

Sexual misconduct has always gone on and it always will even if Mrs May passes a Bill for the Abolition of Original Sin. So let’s ditch the shock and mock horror and get on with the serious business of running the country.

I am just a little concerned to know whether Michael White got out of that BBC studio alive

03 Nov

Look on these things and laugh

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.

What’s new? The defence secretary has resigned because fifteen years ago he placed his hand on a woman’s knee. Even the woman – described of course as “the victim” – said it amounted to nothing much. It is alleged Mr Fallon also gurgled suggestively in Andrea Leadsom’s ear, perhaps with a view to some hanky-panky. Getting suggestive with Andrea Leadsom? Like cuddling an icebreaker. Well, I suppose a defence secretary ought to display some courage.

Someone else whose name I forget – they are all so damned forgettable, these persons-of-note and celebs – has apologised because forty years he spoke to a woman “in a funny tone of voice.”

The madness of modern society is produced by politicians and the media who vigorously sexualise every aspect of our lives – children from the age of five get early training in sexual deviancy – and then affect surprise and outrage when people behave in a frisky fashion

Don’t worry. it will pass. The “inappropriate behaviour” syndrome will go the way of the “every egg is poisonous” proclamation and mad cow disease. In other words, it’s a fashion, a nine days wonder. Before it dies out though, it will have to go through its utterly bonkers stage. In fact we are reaching this stage now – the day when anyone who has not been chatted-up or mildly molested – that is has not been accorded “victim” status – will feel feel socially excluded, a pariah.

But while this latest nonsense is running its course, it is doing a hell of a lot of serious political damage. Brexit is in crisis. The world teeters on the edge of nuclear war. The global Islamic insurgency gathers pace. Immigration remains out of control. Meanwhile the Marxist Corbyn – friend of Hamas, Hezbollah and lately of the IRA – prepares his government in waiting, all unchallenged

The only response from the prime minister is to thrash about like a fish escaped the landing net.

Theresa May is so comically, so pathologically, incompetent that she dare not fortify her political chances by having around her colleagues of ability. Each one is carefully checked to make sure he/she is no damn use and therefore no threat.

That is why we now have her chum Gavin Williamson – of no ministerial experience and knowing nothing of the armed forces – promoted to be defence secretary in place of knee-stroker Fallon.

When we recall the names of those in post-war cabinet office, we can hardly help being impressed – even when the politics of some of them may not be to our liking. There was more than a smattering of ability and panache around in those days.

Churchill’s cabinet in Coronation Year included Eden, Butler, Macmillan, Sandys, Thorneycroft and Brook.

Wilson in 1967 sat round the cabinet table with Stewart, Castle, Crossman, Jenkins and Shore.

Maggie’s gang in 1987 featured Whitelaw, Wakeham, Lawson, Howe, Hurd, Baker, Parkinson, Ridley and Waddington

Now look at Theresa’s pigmies and toadies: Green, Rudd, Greening, Patel, Williamson and Sajid – “Terrorist attacks are part and parcel of living in a cosmopolitan society” – Javid.

Look on these things and laugh. But our laughing is only hysterical. The cackling of the madhouse.

01 Nov

The New Janet and John Reader

“Look, “says Janet “I am a little girl.”

“And I am a little boy,” says John

Janet smiles: “I can be a boy if I wish.”

John pulls a funny face: “And I can be a girl!”

“Can’t!”

“Can!”

“Can’t” How do you know?”

“The gender man told me.”

“There’s no such thing as the gender man. It’s only the prime minister dressed up.”

“Does your dad dress up too, Janet?”

“Sometimes.”

“My dad used to be a woman.”

“Didn’t!”

“Did!”

“Didn’t! Then he would be your mum and not your dad.”

“I like your dress, Janet.”

“You can have it if you want. When I am a boy I shall wear short pants.”

“I am nearly ready to be a girl.”

“How can you tell?”

“I sit down to do a wee.”

“I tried standing up, but there was an awful mess.”

“If I don’t like being a girl, can I change back to a boy again?”

“Of course. You can change as many times as you like.”

“I don’t have to be a boy or a girl.”

“What will you be then?”

“I shall be Zie. The gender man told me.”

“What sort of girl do you want to be, John?”

“I want to be a gay girl.”

“What is that?”

“I shall kiss lots and lots of other girls.”

John starts to cry: “So then you won’t kiss me anymore!”

“Yes I shall – because you will be a girl by then. Why are you still crying”

“I’m so mixed up. And the gender man is scarier than the bogey man.”

“Yes, I wish they would just teach us how to read instead!”

24 Oct

Softly, softly catchee monkee

The county of Herefordshire is one of the most beautiful rural areas of England and its people, being country folk, are conservative in the broad sense of that word. It’s surprising then to see that the Diocese of Hereford is in the avant garde when it comes to issues of social morality. Hereford Diocesan Synod has put down a motion for the General Synod to debate blessings in church for homosexual “marriages.”

What do the boys and girls in head office think about this outburst of rural progressiveness? A spokesperson for the Church of England said:

“Clergy of the Church of England are unable to marry couples of the same sex and, under the House of Bishops’ Pastoral Statement on same Sex Marriage, services of blessing should not be provided for those who enter into civil partnerships or same-sex marriages.”

Let’s tidy up that spokesperson’s language a bit. Clergy are not “unable” to marry couples of the same sex. By the Church’s rules, they are not “permitted” to marry them.

The spokesperson added:

“It is recognised, however, that there is real and profound disagreement in the Church of England over questions relating to human sexuality and the House of Bishops has recently embarked on the preparation of a major new teaching document on marriage and sexuality.”

That sentence could do with a bit of tidying up as well. Take the inaccurate statement, “There is real and profound disagreement in the Church of England over questions relating to human sexuality.” There is in fact no such disagreement, real or unreal, profound or shallow. There can only be rational disagreement when the pertinent facts are in dispute. And here the facts are plain and indisputable: the universal Church from its beginning has always and everywhere declared marriage to be the union of a man and a woman. This it has done on the explicit teaching of Jesus Christ.

So that statement, tidied up, would go something like this: “The Christian Church has always and everywhere declared that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. Only very recently, a vociferous sectional interest pressure group has refused to accept this clear and unequivocal teaching of Scripture and tradition. The Church therefore calls this pressure group to order and requests that they desist from suggesting that marriage can be anything other than ecclesiastical authority has always proclaimed.”

The spokesperson further muddies the waters:

“We are seeking to find ways forward rooted in scripture and the Christian faith as we have received it and which values everyone, without exception, not as a ‘problem’ or an ‘issue’, but as a person loved and made in the image of God.”

Yet again there is tidying up to be done.

Why is the General Synod “seeking ways forward rooted in Scripture and the Christian faith” when there are no such ways? Scripture has not changed over the two millennia of Christianity. On the matter of marriage the teaching has always been the same. What, therefore, could the bishops’ “major new teaching document” possibly have to say when the Church’s doctrine of marriage has never varied?

What is the purpose of the last part of the spokesperson’s statement saying that the General Synod “values everyone, without exception, not as a ‘problem’ or an ‘issue’, but as a person loved and made in the image of God”?

Of course, Christians value everyone as persons “loved and made in the image of God.” The reason this sentence is added here lies in the subtle policy of the Bishops and the Synod to achieve their ultimate aim of allowing homosexual marriage. Disingenuously, they insist that the rules cannot be changed but that homosexuals must be loved and valued by Christian congregations. Christian congregations knew that already. The valuing, loving and welcoming is being used as the first step in a process which will allow doctrine to be based on practice.

De facto acceptance – give it time – will lead to de jure approval. This is the political device preached and practised by revolutionaries everywhere from Quintus Fabius Maximus to Vladimir Lenin: gradualism or softly softly catchee monkee.

Priestly blessings for homosexual “marriages” are already being performed by disobedient clerics. These are the storm-troopers in a guerrilla campaign. Bureaucracies such as the Synod prefer “due procedure.” They will get their way. It will just take a bit longer.

How long? I’d guess the Church of England will solemnise homosexual “marriages” within the next three years

12 Oct

Welby admits he’s hopeless

In an impressive epiphany of self-understanding, Justin Welby has admitted he’s “hopeless.” Never mind that I’ve been telling him as much for years. Still, deficiencies owned up to – even when so late-revealed – are to be commended.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was asked in a magazine interview if he ever suffered from mental ill health and said that in the past year he had sometimes felt hopeless and depressed but had never sought help for it. He said, “I think if you had asked me a year ago I’d have said ‘no’, and ten years ago I would have said ‘absolutely not.’ But what was that phrase Churchill used? ‘black dog’. There is an element of that. I think as I am getting older I am realising it does come from time to time. I have those moments.”

He certainly does have his moments. There was one last month when he returned from his holidays to demand “tax rises on the wealthy and more green technology.”

As his hopelessness lingered, Welby went on: “We are failing those who will grow up into a world where the gap between the richest and poorest parts of the country is significant and destabilising.”

There is a much larger issue which further demonstrates Welby’s hopelessness. Under his – can the word I’m looking for really be “leadership”? – the number of those identifying themselves as Church of England has fallen to an all-time low. Shouldn’t this hopeless Archbishop leave the running of the economy to those who know what they’re talking about and attend instead to the problems in his own backyard? He says the economy is “broken.” Let him first examine the fractures and decline in his own church.

In that magazine interview, Welby revealed to Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s old spin doctor, that he was hopeless yet again when it comes to giving “a straight answer” to the question: “Is gay sex sinful?”

Asked why not, the Archbishop replied: “Because I don’t do blanket condemnation and I haven’t got a good answer to the question. I’ll be really honest about that. I know I haven’t got a good answer to the question. Inherently, within myself, the things that seem to me to be absolutely central are around faithfulness, stability of relationships and loving relationships.”

His words look as if they were composed in the Circumlocution Office. So he’s certainly hopeless when it comes to expressing his thoughts in plain English

While an honest man will admit that he doesn’t know something, an intelligent man will know where to look for the answer. Justin Welby’s honesty is not in doubt. But what of his intelligence? Has the Archbishop of Canterbury never read the Bible? Well, an honest man in a state of uncertainty deserves not our contempt but our sympathy. I sympathise with Justin Welby so, since I have read the Bible, let me try to help him. What we are looking for, Archbishop, is the teaching of Scripture concerning sexual relations. Let us start at the beginning…

“And God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:27-28).

“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24)

Nothing there about a man cleaving unto another man or a woman unto another woman. Never mind, let us look a bit further for more explicit guidance.

“If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” (Leviticus 20:13).

Of course, some critics argue that these words are all from the Old Testament which was written a long time ago and perhaps the New Testament has something different to say? Let us look then at the teaching of Jesus:

“Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication and shall marry another committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery” (Matthew 19:9).

The clear teaching of Jesus then is that sexual relations belong to a lifelong marriage between a man and a woman, and anything other than that is disallowed. But Our Lord’s plain teaching should not stir us to condemn those who fall short of this high standard. When the Scribes and Pharisees were about to stone to death “a woman taken in adultery, in the very act” (John 8:4), Jesus forbid them, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her (John 8:7). And to the woman, “Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more” (John 8:11).

Thus we find here the origin of the Christian commandment that we should hate the sin but love the sinner. What we should notice though is that, while Jesus has mercy on the sinner, he specifically refers to her adultery as a sin.

Difficult as this might be to believe, it seems that the Archbishop of Canterbury has not thought to look at the 3000 years old tradition of Judaeo-Christian ethical teaching to help him settle his mind on the matter of sexual relations. I wonder then if Justin Welby has ever come across – if only in passing – a fairly famous Christian by the name of St Paul?

“And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet” (Romans 1:27).

It seems the Archbishop is so hopeless that he hasn’t even managed to read the Bible.

06 Oct

Rotherham: The Social Workers’ Mecca

The National Federation of Butchers have been awarded this year’s prize for services to vegetarianism. Praising the butchers, the Chair of the Vegetarian Alliance, Ms Flora Vegan-Nutter, said, “We know that butchers are not usually the strictest vegetarians, but the other day I watched a video of a butcher with two sprouts by the side of his T-bone steak. So the VA wants to build on this encouraging start and that’s why we have awarded the NFB this year’s prize.”

Only kidding.

But if you thought that was fake news, here’s something which unfortunately isn’t. I quote from Rotherham Council’s website:

“Rotherham Council has been shortlisted for the Best Social Work Employer of the Year prize in the acclaimed Social Worker of the Year Awards 2017 as a result of their outstanding work with vulnerable children. The Council has been singled out following its successful social work recruitment drive – which has led to more social workers than ever before wanting to come and work in Rotherham. And we have been told by Ofsted in recent monitoring visits that we are have a positive organisational culture.”

Now isn’t that nice for them?

Rotherham has been in the prize-winning frame before. It is only one among so many towns which might have won the accolade for having the most underage girls raped or otherwise sexually-abused by Muslims: 1400 – and these were only the girls definitely identified. In all probability 1400 is a massive underestimation of the scale of this outrage.

The habitual practice of Rotherham social workers – again as with those in a great many other places – was to turn a blind eye to the rape and sexual abuse of children for fear of giving “offence” to “communities” and for being found guilty of the imaginary crime of “Islamophobia.”

It was the Jay Report, under the chairmanship of Mark Greenburg, which exposed these many violent offences.

Mr Greenburg said the Rotherham Social Work Department was guilty of “Multiple and systemic failures.” And then, in what must be the year’s most unfortunate choice of words, he added, “It was more cock-up than conspiracy.”

Too many cocks up, eh Mr Greenburg?

The Jay Report was not the first investigation into the Rotherham scandal and it was earlier revealed that there have been untold thousands of rapes since the 1980s.

And the result? In all those almost forty years, there have been only twenty convictions.

Moreover, the abuse is still going on.

And that’s not fake news either.

05 Oct

“F” Off

The fate which befell the writing on the wall behind Theresa May as she made her speech yesterday contained a message. (He that hath ears to hear, let him hear). One of the letters fell off the wall. “It was the “F” that was off.

It is a measure of the intellectual feebleness and moral frailty of the Tory hierarchy that they could allow May – a woman of stupendous incompetence and sublime ineptness – to ascend to a position of high office. She should never have got further than the back corridor where she might have performed the useful function of keeping the party’s electoral roll up to date. That task might – just – have been within her abilities. I certainly wouldn’t trust her to make the tea.

During her campaign for the leadership, Mrs May asked us to “Judge me on my record.” Happily, there is a lot of record on which to judge her, as she was the longest-serving home secretary since 1945. Her tenure was a conspicuous catalogue of errors and incompetence. Remember 2014 and the chaos caused by the delay in the issue of passports? May claimed this was owing to “a surge in applications,” but it turned out she had been warned the year before that her policy of closing overseas processing offices had resulted in a backlog of 360,000 applications and weeks of delay.

She complained that the Human Rights Act permitted suspected terrorists to continue living in this country under the clause that speaks of their right “to a family life.” She cited the case of one such suspect who was not deported “because he had a pet cat.” Then – trademark May – after so complaining, she did nothing to get the Act amended. As home secretary, she was in charge of the police. She cut their numbers and their budget during a long period in which the terrorist threat was at its highest. She sat back and did nothing for years while in Rotherham, Leicester, Bradford, Rochdale and a dozen other towns and cities the police failed to stop the wholesale rape and sexual abuse of under-age white girls by Muslims This is still going on. She was slow and indecisive in her pathetic attempt to intervene in the infiltration of schools in Birmingham by Islamic extremists. She described sharia courts as “beneficial” and allowed them to operate in parallel with British law – and this in spite of the fact that such courts are complicit in the mistreatment of Muslim women by their menfolk.

The list of her sins, negligences and ignorances, her half-baked and deranged actions and inactions, is almost endless. But the worst of her many failures was her record on immigration. As home secretary, she was charged to put into practice Cameron’s declared aim of reducing the number of immigrants from over half a million every year to “the tens of thousands.” In fact, during her tenure net immigration increased from a million to three million. But here is the truly laughable bit – were it not so catastrophic for our country: May claimed she was powerless to reduce immigration “because of Shengen, the EU’s open borders rule.” And then she voted for Remain! How’s that for joined-up thinking?

She began her term her term as prime minister by announcing economic and social policies that you might think belonged exclusively to Jeremy Corbyn. She wants to curb executive pay. Apart from the fact that this could be achieved only by the adoption of the most draconian and demagogic policies, it would also drive the best talent into the arms of our competitors. Her plans to ensure more women are appointed to company boards is yet another example of her liking for social engineering, while her other ambitions for tighter regulation of the City and a more socialistic approach to industrial relations will lead, give it time, to the sort of sclerosis which paralyses the economy in France. The sole criteria for the selection and appointment to senior jobs in commerce and industry should be competence, and when competence is jeopardised the results are always inefficiency and mediocrity. Besides, decisions about whom to appoint to senior management are the prerogative of the companies concerned and are no business of the government – especially a Conservative government. May is leading the party so far to the left that I’m tempted to say Britain is unique among the nations: not only do we have a socialist opposition, we have a socialist government as well.

Like all weak leaders, she has appointed wets and yes-men. After the Referendum vote, what Britain needed most was the announcement of vigorous Tory economic policies. Taxes should have been cut drastically and a bonfire made of the sheaves of regulations which strangle the life out of the City. Instead, May appointed a chancellor of the exchequer who gave us an autumn statement so anodyne it put me to sleep. Talking of sleep, the new home secretary, Amber Rudd, is clearly not up to the job and, like May herself when she occupied that office, she refuses to tackle the problem that threatens to sink our country altogether: mass immigration, now at a record level.

Her rhetorical insistence that “Brexit means Brexit” is a lie and a sham. A lie because she is a declared Remainer. A sham because her negotiations with the EU amount to capitulation. She has accepted “a period of transition” which guarantees we shall have no momentum out for four years – and probably forever. This is exactly what May wants. She has promised to go on paying exorbitant sums to the EU for the foreseeable future.

The woman is a disastrous shambles.

Even in today’s etiolated Tory party, surely there are enough “suits” who will fall in behind the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, stroll across to Number Ten and tell her it’s time to go?

If she lingers, the future for the country is Corbyn, the renowned fan of Chavez and Maduro and the Venezuela where people are scavenging in dustbins for food and stealing zoo animals to provide their next meal.

May has sat here too long for any good she might have done. She should go. And for all our sakes, she should go quickly.

04 Oct

Britain’s Apartheid

At the Conservative conference, Theresa May urged the party to value “our communities.”

Wrong from the start. Doubly wrong coming from someone who claims to be a Conservative. For at the root of conservatism is the notion of all the people as being one community. This was splendidly expressed by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary where he derided Whiggery as “a faction.”

Conservatism had its origins in the Elizabethan Settlement in which church and state were seen as the one realm in two different aspects – with the monarch as head of state and supreme governor of the Church of England. No doubt this is the origin too of the saying that the Church of England is “the Tory party at prayer.” Toryism in the 18th century – Johnson’s Toryism – was concerned above all with strengthening this belief in the oneness of the realm. The people of that time remembered the civil war and rabid sectarianism which tore the country apart in the previous century and they vowed that this must not happen a second time.

So they built on the Elizabethan Settlement a polity which was concerned above all with national unity. In order for this to succeed it must be a unity that did not make extreme demands on the people. Indeed, this had been at the centre of the original Settlement. Nothing too onerous. Yes, people should go to church, but not every week as if they were enthusiasts or fanatics but, according to The Book of Common Prayer, “three times a year of which Easter should be one.” Only a conformity which did not demand anything excessive could possibly work as the bedrock of peace and stability.

And this is what that other Settlement under the Restoration in 1660 aimed to achieve.

These are things of which we should all be proud because they demonstrated generosity when, with the passing of the Test and Corporation Act of 1828 and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics were incorporated as full members of the nation.

This worked remarkably well until the mass immigrations of the 20th century. Those arriving on our shores were not enjoined to adopt our way of life but allowed – even encouraged – to separate off into what the multiculturalists – and now Mars May – refer to as “communities.”

What they actually are, of course, is ghettos. When such separate development was practised in South Africa, British politicians condemned it as Apartheid. When precisely the same thing happens over here, it is regarded as wholesome “diversity.”

This, Mrs May, is not the route to social cohesion: it is the way back to the murderous sectarianism of the English Civil War.

30 Sep

Your supper is in the dustbin

It’s countdown to Corbyn. We shall not be kept waiting for long before we find ourselves living – if “living” is the right word here – under the most extreme left wing government Britain has ever seen. Corbyn’s plans make Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto – called at the time “the longest suicide note in history” – read like a discussion paper produced by The Monday Club.

The Corbynistas are preaching “Socialism for the 21st century” – an oxymoron to rival “Valve radios for the digital age.”

There will be wholesale nationalisation, massive borrowing and spending, the abolition of all pay restraint and an expanded benefits system. Give Corbyn credit for one thing: he is a true prophet. He rightly predicts that his policies will lead to a run on the pound and a financial crisis.

What he does not foresee is that in this crisis investment will plummet as financiers put their money where it is likely to secure a return: they will not toss it into the stagnant and bottomless pit of Corbyn’s socialism. No investment means no real jobs but only a hugely-expanded and unproductive public sector paid for out of even more borrowing. All that borrowed money sloshing around will lead to high – and eventually hyper – inflation. Millions will be unemployed. People’s savings will be rendered worthless. Thus Corbyn’s foolish and wicked policies will most hurt those he claims to champion: the least well off throughout the country.

But this horrible dystopian nightmare won’t really come to pass, will it? The Tories under Theresa May will get their act together and mount a vigorous defence of capitalism and the free market.

Oh yes, and Ben Stokes will win The Polite Society’s Award for Gentlemanly Conduct.

Mrs May will not outline the virtues of capitalism and the free market – because she believes in neither. If she did, she would cut taxes and abolish strangulating business regulations. Instead since that terrible day she became prime minister, she has declared she is determined that the government will make even greater interventions in boardrooms, the minimum wage will be regularly increased and the cap on public sector pay will be scrapped.

Observing Corbyn’s army of snowflakes – all those innocent young people to whom he is promising the earth – May is promising today “to create a fairer society for the young.” But she can’t bribe them with a pint when Corbyn is offering them a firkin.

Why can’t she see that stealing the left’s political clothes will leave her dangerously undressed?

During last June’s election campaign a commentator remarked, only partly jesting, that Theresa May had “…adopted Ed Miliband’’s manifesto and moved it to the left.”

Is there any support for capitalism and the free market in today’s Conservative party? No, there is about as much capitalism among the Tories as logic in the editorial department of the Daily Telegraph.

Yesterday that newspaper shouted, “May must outline her capitalist policies.”

She doesn’t have any.

Followed by this ripe piece of idiocy: “The intellectual case for capitalism is easy to make. What of the moral one?”

But the intellectual case includes the moral case – otherwise there is nothing intelligent about it.

And if you think the Telegraph couldn’t get even stupider, how about this: “May’s vision is of a free market combined with sensible regulation.”

But if it’s regulated, it’s not free.

I’m probably not such a good prophet as Jeremy Corbyn, that great admirer of Chavez, Maduro and the state of Venezuela where there’s no food in the shops and people are stealing zoo animals to provide their next meal. But let me try my hand at prophecy nonetheless:

The days are coming when a wife shall leave a note for her husband saying: “Darling – I’ve gone to the Labour rally. Scavenge for your supper in the dustbin.”

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

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