Proud republican and self-confessed radical Beatrix Campbell utterly detests the whole rotten British honours system:
The survival of an honours system clothed in royalism and imperialism is a reproach to New Labour’s craven sentiment about pomp and power. It’s timidity about reforming the constitution and its indulgent accommodation of the monarchy encourages the belief that these institutions are somehow natural, that radical renewal is too painful – that powerful people’s feelings would be hurt.
Mmm. Not sure I would agree with that, but if that’s what ex-Communist Party member Campbell believes it’s obviously up to her.
By clinging to symbols and rituals that belong to a cruel imperial order the government compromises the gonged.
Right.
Clearly someone who holds such black and white political views would, if offered a worthless imperialist trinket in the first place, either discretely refuse or – less elegantly – make her political point by returning the blood-soaked bauble after it has been awarded.
Don’t you believe it.
Fantastically funny furious jettisoning of long-held principles here.
PS: Gaelic speaking readers may well have appreciated how apposite the surname of our latest holder of the Order of the British Empire’s surname turned out to be before anyone else.
Hat tip: Mesquito in the comments.
