Peter Tatchell has the odd whacky old view but surely no-one can doubt his heroic work as a civil liberties campaigner over many years. many of his bones have been broken as he put his body on the line for his beliefs and, for me at least, he is one of the great heros of our age. Tatch has been offered a new year's gong several times but as a man of rigid principle he has refused on exactly the same grounds as I would refuse in the, exceedingly unlikely, event that I was offered a gong.
For starters while I think Tatch ( like me) admires the Queen as a person we are both Republicans and thus taking a gone from Her Maj would be rank hypocrisy. And secondly the system is so horribly corrupt that only those devoid of principle would want to be a part of it.
Seeing Shami Chakrabati made a peer by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party just weeks after she published a whitewash of anti-semitism in the Labour Party was one of the real low points of 2016. Today, in the New Year Honours list , we see that Posh Spice is an OBE for services to the airhead industry, civil servant Mark Lowcock who has blown hundreds of millions of quid of taxpayers cash on duff foreign aid schemes gets a gong as do a stack of large donors to the Tory Party. Rewards are for failure, being a celeb or just for handing over cash.
If this system is not corrupt and debauched what is? I judge folks like Peter Tatchell on their deeds not on any baubles handed out as part of a system that is now beneath contempt. It is another sign that we live in a feeble and morally degeneate society that is living off past glories, that we take such matters as being of any import at all.