Gongs
Can it really be true – those nasty little Nu Labour meddlers are actually going to leave one of our institutions alone? Surely not, I must have been drinking when I read it. It seems that for the moment that knighthoods, damehoods & the Order of the British Empire have been granted respite from the nefarious clutches of the socialist pondlife that are intent on running this once great country, into the ground.
As ever, there is no doubt some underhand plan being hatched by St. Toni’s evil little mandarins as no one one likes bring elevated to the ‘Lords’ than a former Labour politican or Trades Union leader. After all, Lord Scumbag of Work to Rule does have a certain ring to it, doesn’t it dear readers?
However, in the spirit of all that is completely rotten in Westminster, Her Majesty’s Government (HRH must choke every time that she hears that title applied to Mr Blah & his coterie of cronies) decrees that
"The government does not believe that the case has been made for the change to the Order of the British Empire. It is regarded with affection and respect by very many people, not only in the UK. But the government is conscious that for some the title of the Order of the British Empire feels anachronistic in a different sense to other historic titles."
Well I for one couldn’t give be more ambivalent if the likes of black poet Benjamin Zephaniah turned down his OBE in 2003, saying the title gave an impression of white supremacy. For those of you that have never come across this particular ‘poet’, he is the sort of fellow that confuses a choristers surplus for the Klansman’s uniform – the sort of chap that get offended at weathermen using the term ‘black ice’.
Anyway,he day Buck House phones up Free Market Towers asking which particular throat order your humble correspondent would like, my only question will be does the gong come with epaulets?
Besides, if that honours system were scrapped, we would miss comic opportunities that appeal to the British sense of humour. If knighthoods went the way of foxhunting, we would no longer have a ‘Sir Lancelot’ – oh yes, there is one, I should know, he is one of Mrs FM’s godfathers.
Comments
A choristers surplus would be terrible: we'd either have to store the extraneous choirboys in the warehouses that formerly contained EU food mountains, or hunt them for sport.
Posted by: john b | February 23, 2005 4:47 PM
The way I understood it, the problem was not so much that the government disliked the old titles. It was that the kind of people they wished to hand them out to possessed such a warped sense of history as to mistake good old Other B****rs Efforts for a reference to slavery. Another case for dissolving the people and reelecting another one, perhaps.
Posted by: James Hamilton | February 25, 2005 1:09 PM