Offensive posts could now see you stripped of your knighthood or other honours, under official guidance on when awards can be taken away. The Telegraph has the story:
Dignitaries risk the humiliation of having honours taken from them for comments that officials accept “do not amount to criminal conduct”.
Free speech campaigners believe that public figures will be put off accepting honours in future for fear of being stripped of the awards at a later date, including knighthoods and CBEs.
The Free Speech Union (FSU) said the emergence of the guidance showed the criteria for withdrawing awards were “far too broad”.
The secret guidance, obtained through a freedom of information request, states that “hate incidents”, which “cannot be prosecuted”, could lead to honours being removed.
It was produced by the forfeiture committee, which sits in secret and considers complaints made against honours holders.
The guidance raises the prospect of honours recipients having awards removed for posting comments perceived as offensive on the basis of “protected characteristics”, such as race, gender identity or sexual orientation.
It draws on a definition of “hate incidents” used by police and prosecutors in which “the victim or anyone else thinks [the incident] was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on one of five prescribed characteristics – disability, race, religion, transgender identity or sexual orientation”. …
Lord Young of Acton, founder and General Secretary of the FSU, said: “The forfeiture committee’s criteria for recommending the withdrawal of an honour are far too broad and getting broader all the time, turning the committee into an instrument for enforcing progressive orthodoxy.”
He added: “If people know their honours could be withdrawn if they say something politically contentious that the committee disagrees with, even if it’s a perfectly legal, mainstream view, anyone Right-of-Centre will think twice about accepting one in future.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Mail has a non-paywalled version of the same story.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Among others, a lot of awards go to sports people.
Also, I think people like Ebon Upton deserve their award (look him up, and Raspberry Pi
I wonder what was behind the Sir Jimmy story, and many other non-online Sir Stories?
IMHO nobody show ever be stripped of an ‘honour’ for any reason whatsoever. That way their true ‘worth’ is more clearly exposed to public gaze.
That said, there are people who are honoured who I feel merit it. Toby would be one, Clare Short and Kate Hoey two more. A great number of people quietly get on with work of public benefit without drawing undue attention to themselves, some of whom are sometimes honoured. Overall, however, all such systems are almost necessarily corrupt, rewarding time-servers and toadies.
The political class is really doubling down, isn’t it. But still Mandelson is a peer.
And nothing has been heard in over a year. Maybe its coming soon and that’s why Sir Kweir stood down, and the Burnham take over was not for the reason it was purported to be.
If there is type of dissent the establishment does not tolerate at all is dissent from its own ranks. That’s basically treason.
I’m relieved to report that this is a situation that is unlikely to embroil me.
They can’t strip what you don’t have.
Phew!
The situation is unlikely to embroil me either! However, I have two comments.
First, how do all these people wind up with these honours? I only have known a couple. They both seem to have gone through their entire life in academia, charity or NGO work. The cynic in me says that people with honours belong to a sort of mutual congratulatory club which is characterised by awarding each other badges, like Honorary Doctorships, so ultimately each member of the club in retirement has huge number of letters and wall coverings and a lot fake friends. (Conversely, as Dilbert wryly observed, IIRC, engineers work in a world where they might get donuts for making things work but invariably get a lot of black marks if a building falls down or a bridge collapses or a plane breaks up and hundreds of people die.) So engineers are cannot be stripped of badges (and have eaten the donuts). Surgeons have the same life, I guess.
Secondly, what happens if you are stripped, not of your MBE, but of your job, or de-registered from a mandatory register, because of a tweet which is not “on-message”, or even a similar workplace comment? This seems… Read more »
You have answered you own question as to how they got the awards.
Academia, charity or NGO are parts of gge system do they get awards.