Skip to main content

Dis-Honours

Stripping Fred Goodwin of his knighthood may be popular- it is also deeply wrong.


At a time when convicted criminals, such as Jeffery Archer, can still be called Lord Archer and still have access to the privileges of the peerage, to strip a man convicted of no crime, because what he may (or may not) have done is unpopular looks like the worse kind of witch hunt- it is giving in to the baying of the mob.


Many tabloid newspaper editors and journalists have been knighted or have received other honours- how come there has been no such outcry against them? Tabloids were not guilty of misjudgement, but as we now know, of crimes- presumably once the Leveson inquiry is over we will strip all the journalists of their awards- as Johan Hari has been stripped of the Orwell prize (and now, belatedly his job).


I think John Prescott is a lecherous incompetent- I think we should strip him of his peerage- indeed he should never have received it. In fact I think anyone on the Labour benches should be stripped of any honours they may have. Actually I don't like Tories much either- how come Patrick Cormack- as pompous to his own side as to everyone else- gets to keep his knighthood? 


Unless Fred Goodwin was convicted of a crime, how can he be dis-honoured like this?


The honours system has been a farce for years- now it descends into something much worse.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more