If you are going to give gongs for public service, I guess a three-times elected London mayor ought to be a candidate. True, it is hard to see what particular achievements have earned Sadiq Khan his knighthood. Violent crime has risen inexorably on his watch, while his efforts to clean up London’s air have been clumsy at best, making life next-to-impossible for low-wage shift workers in outer London who really don’t have any option but to commute to work in their 20 year-old cars. Cars, it should be noted, which are not a lot less clean than the newer Chelsea Tractors which wealthy Londoners – Khan included – use to get around. But that rather misses the point: Khan has been elected three times, so some people must think he is doing a good job. Carping over his knighthood – like that of Tony Blair’s – seems somewhat un-conservative. If you believe in public service and an honours system you should welcome a long-serving mayor being granted an honour – even if he is on the other side of the political fence from you.
Surely, he should have refused an honour which is dripping with colonial associations.
More to the point is why on Earth has Khan accepted a knighthood? This is a man who has vowed to ‘decolonise’ London, offering £25,000 grants to neighbourhoods which wish to change their street names, dumping the legacies of colonial figures. One road which underwent such treatment is Havelock Road in Southall, named after Sir Henry Havelock, a general in British-India, which now goes by the name Guru Nanak Road. Khan has also spoken against the national curriculum (over which thankfully he has no control) on the grounds that it tells Britain’s history from a colonial point of view, saying it only offers ‘one-dimensional perspectives on Black History’.
Why, then, has Khan agreed to become a Knight of the Order of the British Empire? Surely, he should have refused an honour which is dripping with colonial associations. To accept it opens him up to charges of gross hypocrisy. It seems that he detests everything about the British Empire – until, that is, he succumbs to flattery. Accepting a knighthood makes him seem shallow and unprincipled.
Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to accept a knighthood for his services as Director of Public Prosecutions is much the same. Given his taking of the knee, why does he want to be associated with the British Empire? It would earn him some respect – or at least make him a little more consistent in his politics – if he wrapped up his gong and sent it back to the Palace like John Lennon did.
Instead, Starmer has embraced the honours system, like so many Labour prime ministers before him, as a means of bestowing political patronage – and as a rather feeble form of compensation for colleagues that he was embarrassed to sack. I am sure that Dame Emily Thornberry has many fine qualities – but evidently they were not sufficient to persuade Starmer to put her in his cabinet.
The Labour party’s attitude to the honours systems shows that it only does socialism around the edges. The Prime Minister is happy to boot hereditary peers out of the House of Lords, calling them an anachronism – yet then goes ahead and creates a mini-aristocracy of his own, using titles which are surely every bit as anachronistic.
