This
article of mine appears in the London Progressive Journal:
Regular readers are aware of my view of Winston
Churchill. On the five pound note, he will replace Elizabeth Fry, whom Michael
Gove also wants to remove from the National Curriculum along with Robert Owen.
Thus is at least the non-Marxist Left routinely written out of British and
wider history.
In which vein, there are a staggering 25 vacancies,
out of 65 available places, in the Order of Companions of Honour. Moreover of
the current members of that Order which has always been heavy with politicians,
precisely two have ever been Labour. One of those has not been so since 1981,
and he advocated a vote for the Conservatives in 1992.
The other, severely compromised from the Chagos
Islands to the IMF, will be 96 this year, like the Order itself. By contrast,
no fewer than 11 are in receipt of the Conservative Whip in the House of Lords.
A twelfth is that party's serving Chief Whip in the House of Commons. A
thirteenth is John Major.
Yet of the original 17 Companions of Honour, five
were trade union leaders, Labour politicians, or both. A sixth was a leader of
the women's suffrage movement which had not at that time attained its
objective. A seventh was soon afterwards to expand her social reforming work
into Independent Liberal political activity. Two more were Liberal Unionists.
If the industrialist Viscount Chetwynd took the Conservative Whip, then he was
the only person on the list who was in any sense politically involved with that
party, and even then barely so.
The pattern was set for many decades thereafter:
relatively right-wing Labour politicians by pre-Blair standards, a few
downright left-wing figures, trade union leaders, upper and upper-middle-class
Boadiceas of social reform, luminaries of the Australian Labor and New Zealand
Labour Parties, an extremely long-serving editor of the Manchester Guardian,
a prominent campaigner on behalf of the rural working class.
Peace activists were notably numerous. The first
Prime Minister of independent Papua New Guinea remains, while the first Prime
Minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago was also a member. There was even
an Indian nationalist politician. The one who had been Prime Minister of
Northern Ireland had been a founder-member of the Ulster Unionist Labour
Association, and had gone on to chair it.
There was a distinct preponderance of
Nonconformist ministers, as well as towards Scotland and, strikingly in view of
its relative smallness within the population, towards Wales. There were
brilliantly maverick clergymen, generally influenced by Tractarianism, such as
the Church of England used to produce: Wilson Carlile, Dick Shepherd, Tubby
Clayton, Chad Varah. Varah did not die until 2007, yet he is already an
unimaginable figure.
There were plenty of other people, too, including
lots of Tories. But the old Radical tradition was very much in evidence. Alas,
no more. Despite there being quite enough room for its current grandees in an
Order not even two-thirds full.
For example, three people were Cabinet Ministers
continuously from 1997 to 2010. Respectively, they ended their time as Prime
Minister, as Lord Chancellor, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two of the
three living former Deputy Prime Ministers are Companions of Honour, but not
the third. A former European Commissioner who used to chair the Conservative
Party is so honoured, but not the Briton who was Vice-President of the European
Commission during exactly the same period. And so on.
Oh, well, appointments are
made on Prime Ministerial recommendation. Those are five recommendations
to be made on Ed Miliband's first day. It is hardly as if they would
fail to leave plenty of room for anyone else.
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