Total of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan = 396
Chance of debate on our discredited Honours system. Plans to use honours to push political schemes are about to be hatched. The Telegraph reports:
The Daily Telegraph disclosed yesterday for the first time the official list of everyone who rejected an honour between 1949 and 1999, and has since died.
Pressure is mounting on ministers to release the identities of other people who have rejected an honour in the past decade.
New figures from the Cabinet Office show that over the past three years 116 people have rejected honours, but they are not identified.
They show that 30 people turned down honours in last year’s Queen’s Birthday and New Year’s honours lists. That compared with 46 in 2010 and 40 in 2009.
Authors JB Priestley and Roald Dahl and the painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and LS Lowry were among 277 people on the list, which was disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act after a 15 month battle with the Cabinet Office
The list also included honours rejected by Trevor Howard, the actor, Alfred Hitchcock, the Hollywood director, Aldous Huxley, the author, and Henry Moore, the sculptor.
Paul Flynn MP, a Labour member of the Public Administration Select Committee which has scrutinised the honours’ process, said that the Government should release the names of others who have turned down an honour.
He said that they should be dubbed ‘HRH’ – which stood for “Has Rejected Honour” – because in his view turning down a Knighthood, an OBE or an MBE was “the highest honour of all”.
The list, published on the Cabinet Office’s website on Wednesday, also included the physicist Paul Dirac and DNA pioneer Francis Crick.
Campaigners said the disclosure of the list was a further example of the value of the FOI legislation.
Maurice Frankel, who runs the Campaign for Freedom of Information, said: "This decision illustrates a key aspect of the FOI Act. The requester did not have to show why disclosure of this information about honours was important.
"The onus was on the Government to show why disclosure would be harmful – and it couldn’t do that. The starting point under FOI is that openness about public affairs is itself in the public interest, something that many public authorities haven't yet accepted."
The Cabinet Office said it had no plans to publish more information about so called ‘honours refuseniks’. A spokesman said: “We answered a specific FOI requesting information on deceased people who have refused honours.
“It is up to individuals whether they wish to accept or refuse an honour. We have no plans to routinely publish a list of those people who refuse honours.”
Previous authoritative leaks suggest actress Honor Blackman, jazz musician George Melly, artist David Hockney and novelist John le Carre have all turned down honours.
Other names include the pop star David Bowie, the celebrity cook Nigella Lawson, playwright Michael Frayn and the comedy act Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.
The actor Albert Finney is also understood to have rejected a knighthood in 2000, and a CBE two decades earlier in 1980.
The current ludicrous honours system is nothing more than a device to aggrandize the Windsor family. It visibly reinforces the notion that those being honoured are socially lower than they are (everybody). Those annointed are embraced by the existing club of self-interested oath-takers and join the list of the 'bought-off'. Subequent criminality is not always a bar to retention. Genuine endeavour should be recognised by citizens. Prominent actors, pedestrian singers of popular songs or those who have served as 'royal protection officers', should not automatically receive them. Associating public honours with backward-looking notions of empire, or this family of dynasts should cease forthwith. Honours should also not be used to create a superior class of human beings.
Posted by: Tim Cooper | February 05, 2012 at 04:48 PM