The last person to be stripped of a knighthood was Robert Mugabe in 2008. His title was honorary, as was that of Nicolai Ceausescu, who lost his in 1989, on the day before he was executed during the Romanian uprising. Before them, Anthony Blunt, the traitor who gave British secrets to the Soviets, was similarly disgraced. The criteria, therefore, for losing a knighthood have been exceptional: treason, criminality and brutal, despotic governance.


Where, in this scale of enormity, does Fred Goodwin – as we must now call him – appear? He has committed no crime; he was not severely admonished by the Financial Services Authority’s report into the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, of which he was chief executive. The decision to strip him of his knighthood sets a new benchmark, whereby anyone identified as a convenient scapegoat for the country’s woes can be similarly disparaged.


We are no admirers of Mr Goodwin, whose egregious errors as head of RBS required a £45 billion bail-out by the taxpayer. But in what way is he different from Sir Tom McKillop, the bank’s then chairman? Is he, too, to lose his knighthood? Where does the witch hunt stop? Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, retains his honorary knighthood – and yet his monetary policy arguably did more damage to the global economy than anything Mr Goodwin managed to achieve.


More to the point, why – as we asked last week – is the Honours Forfeiture Committee, a shadowy and allegedly independent body, not now looking into the peerages of Lord Archer (jailed for perjury), or Lords Hanningfield and Taylor (both jailed for expenses fraud)? It has surely exceeded its remit, which is to act only when an individual “has been found guilty by the courts of a criminal offence… or has been censured/struck off etc by the relevant regulatory authority or professional body for actions or failures to act which are directly relevant to the granting of the honour”. In America, if executives are suspected of committing an offence, they are tried and dealt with severely. Here, in the absence of any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we choose ritual humiliation instead.


It has been a disastrous few days for this country’s reputation as an attractive place for financiers and businessmen. First, Stephen Hester, the new boss of RBS, was forced to relinquish his bonus; now Mr Goodwin has been dragged to the stocks. David Cameron and the other leading politicians who have encouraged this populist bloodlust should be ashamed of themselves. Now that the precedent has been set, the mob will want more, because it always does. So who will be next?

Who’s next in line for ritual humiliation? - Telegraph

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Originally Posted by Zichao

It has been a disastrous few days for this country’s reputation as an attractive place for financiers and businessmen.

So it's a win-win then.

Yeah, i had the same reaction...

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Ditto
F

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"Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it."-- Mark Twain

"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.36

Quote:

The United States Constitution is one of the few really great documents ever compiled by politicians. It is crisp and short and clear, and it is on the side of the citizen rather than the state. I keep it by my desk. Just after the news that Fred Goodwin was to be stripped of his knighthood, I happened to be riffling through it, and my eye fell on this sentence from Section 9: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed”. A Bill of Attainder was a device of the powerful in pre-modern England. If the King and his government decided that they did not like someone, they would get him “attainted” (which means “stained”) by Parliament. The Bill would punish him for some supposed offence without giving him the chance to be heard in court. It stripped him (and sometimes his descendants) of his lands and titles. It was a political device. An ex post facto law, of course, is a law that enables someone to be punished for an offence which, when committed, was not an offence. It is therefore blatantly unjust, and also, often, political. Poor Fred Goodwin must wish he were an American citizen (although, since the US Constitution also states that “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States”, he would not have got a knighthood there in the first place). He has been, in effect, attainted. And he has been subject to ex post facto judgment. What he was doing with the Royal Bank of Scotland when he was knighted in 2004 was considered fine and dandy by the then British government. Now he is being punished, because the wind has changed. Indeed, Mr Goodwin is being even more unfairly treated than those rebel earls who were attainted under the Tudors. At least they had a chance for their case to be debated in Parliament. Mr Goodwin’s good name was stained for ever by the Honours Forfeiture Committee, stuffed with senior civil servants (almost all of them knights or dames, needless to say). He had no right to be consulted, represented by lawyers, or considered by Parliament. The committee is repeatedly described by politicians as “independent”, but since it is governmental, it cannot be so. In reality, it acted only because of pressure from the Prime Minister. It waived its own strict rules about the criteria according to which honours are withdrawn, and replaced them with much vaguer ones. Under the chairmanship of the new head of the Civil Service, Sir Bob Kerslake, supported by the new Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood – neither of whom, presumably, has any experience of this sort of thing – it decided that RBS played “an important role in the financial crisis of 2008-2009”, and therefore Sir Fred should revert to just plain Fred. If that is the criterion, The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP should not lose just his seat, his place in the Privy Council and whatever commemorative gold fountain pens he may have received for making boring speeches in Davos. Attainting is too good for him. Since we are reverting to medieval punishments, a bit of good old hanging, drawing and quartering would seem appropriate. One must, I admit, be realistic. Governments often find themselves in tight corners, and the overhang of bankers’ pay, bonuses and gongs into the era of recession is one such for the Coalition. It is part of the role of senior civil servants inconspicuously to help their masters out of such corners. It is the job of the cabinet secretary, in particular, to be like Jeeves with Bertie Wooster. He must help his boss divert the indignant aunt of public opinion with the necessary fibs, flattery and brainy schemes. So yesterday I asked Lord Armstrong, cabinet secretary under Mrs Thatcher, and the man who recommended that the traitor Anthony Blunt be stripped of his knighthood, what he thought. Picking his words with mandarin care, Lord Armstrong told me that, if he had been asked to consider Sir Fred, “I should have said that this goes beyond the criteria.” The Government would be within its rights to change the criteria, he went on, and the committee could help it do so. But this should happen before any individual case, and with the agreement of the Palace, to avoid embarrassing the Queen. Otherwise, the problem is publicly dumped on civil servants, whose committee then becomes – my phrase, not Lord Armstrong’s – a kangaroo court. Then I asked the same question of his successor, Lord Butler of Brockwell, and his answer was virtually identical. Since honours are not jobs, and are conferred by the gracious pleasure of the Sovereign rather than any contractual process, it may be that Mr Goodwin has no legal redress. Besides, he may prefer to remain quiet. But if I were him, armed with his still considerable private collection of good old British banknotes and with no more reputation left to lose, I would try to go to law. I would seek judicial review of the process by which I had been attainted. I would invite Sir Bob Kerslake to tell the court what 10 Downing Street had said to him before the whole process got under way. And if the judges found that the committee had behaved improperly, I would then apply to the Honours Forfeiture Committee to have Sir Bob and his colleagues stripped of their knighthoods. Maybe none of this matters. Maybe Fred Goodwin is such a disgraceful fellow that we are all entitled to kick him around as we please. But I cannot help thinking that the provision against attainder is in the US Constitution for a good reason. It is to stop whoever happens to be in power at any one time from taking it out on whomever he dislikes who isn’t. The fact that the victim may be unmeritorious is not the point. The point is that the rule of law is what distinguishes us from the beasts. Fred Goodwin got knighted because of crony capitalism. It does not make things better if he is un-knighted by crony anti-capitalism. But let us look ahead, and think, as David Cameron has done throughout, politically. By shaming Mr Goodwin and creating the pressure that made Stephen Hester give up his bonus, the Prime Minister has placed himself on the side of pubic opinion. He has made it easier for him to attack bonuses in future. He has blunted a Labour attack which had tried to make him seem incapable of responding to public outrage. So far as it goes, all this will help him. But one of the odd things about being populist is that it generally does not make you popular. It is often the way that the mob, seeing leaders who try to ape it, grows disgusted. The most successful politics is the unpopular action which is then proved right, not the popular action which later looks a bit tawdry. The other question is one for what The Times, when it appealed to them, used to call “top people”. If, after all this, you are a chief executive wondering whether to locate your big company in Britain, will you feel welcome? If you are a businesswoman asked to rescue a government enterprise, a civil servant wondering whether to try to become a permanent secretary or leave for the private sector, or a scientist called on to run a quango, will you think, “Well, I may get less money, but I shall command respect, have the loyalty of ministers and be knighted if I do the job well”? I think we know the answer.

Fred Goodwin: a modern-day knight made to suffer a medieval punishment - Telegraph

Well, it's a fair point. But at the end of the day, it's only a bauble. Does anyone outside the Telegraph actually care who's a knight of the realm and who isn't? It would have been a different matter had it been a peerage.

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Paul Vallely: Must honour really be a thing of the past? - Commentators - Opinion - The Independent

Quote:

There are principles, and then there are politics. In law we may hold to the precept that a man is innocent until proven guilty. But politics, like football, is a different matter, as the cases of Chris Huhne and John Terry show. The pair stand accused, and that is enough for them to have lost the positions of Climate Change Secretary and captain of the England football team respectively. You cannot continue in your job once a serious charge has been levelled against you. That is the modern received wisdom. We know this is wrong. A teacher friend of mine was suspended for nine months pending a trumped-up allegation that he had hit a pupil. You hear similar stories about teachers being falsely accused by pupils with a grudge or crush on them. An accusation is enough to sully in the politics of reputation. It's more than the supposition of no smoke without fire. Nick Clegg has announced that if Huhne is exonerated he can return to the Cabinet. Perhaps so. But privately, senior Lib Dems have been saying Huhne can never be party leader now. "He is tarnished goods," said one. Even a charge appears to bring some taint. The process by which Fred the Shred became Fred the Pleb is equally instructive. The former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Fred Goodwin, was stripped of his knighthood by the Queen after a recent report into the RBS collapse by the Financial Services Authority. It sharply criticised him for excessive risk-taking which forced the taxpayer to stump up £45bn to prevent the entire British banking sector collapsing. A knighthood awarded "for services to banking" was clearly unsustainable. This is not to do with honours so much as honour. Goodwin has no right of appeal. Nor was he allowed to make representations to the Forfeiture Committee which humbled him. An honour is gratuitously given, and it can be similarly taken away. To ask whether this is fair is to miss the point. It is like asking why I should be stopped for speeding when faster cars are not. If I have broken the law that is enough and I must accept the consequences, or the Speed Awareness Course at any rate. Yet honour does not operate like law. Indeed the very word now smacks of something archaic. It is a code from the 1950s about duty and loyalty, trust and taking responsibility, standards and self-discipline, all of them self-regulating. Of course it goes back much further than that. From Cicero to Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Hume and Adam Smith the idea was commonplace that people will not act in accordance with the public interest without some incentive. Concern for their honour and reputation – rooted in what Dr Johnson defined as "nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness" – was perceived as a prime motive. Honour has, however, become degraded in our time. It held sway in feudal societies, in medieval chivalry, in cultures which herded animals, in the wild West, in criminal underworlds and gang cultures – anywhere that the rule of law did or does not reach. There it can be ruthlessly effective, but it can also be blind and cruel, as so-called honour killings testify. And it holds sway still in the Army where men's lives depend more upon friendship and bonding than on conscience or law, which is what has replaced honour in modern societies. We still have a hollowed-out remnant of the notion of honour, which is what causes the current confusion. Later in the Enlightenment, utilitarian thinkers such as John Stuart Mill switched the dominant philosophy to a calculus which was overwhelmingly pragmatic and deeply rooted in a view of the world where economics overruled all else. Only in a utilitarian world could a man like Harry Redknapp, the football manager on trial for cheating the public revenue, have, last week, told a jury that he had an obligation to tell the truth to the police but not to a journalist. Football is a perfect exemplar of the way the world has changed, where too much money has corrupted the essence of what the game was once about. Life is now not about playing the game; it is about winning. The entire way we conceive of the relationship between private and public has shifted. So has the difference between how we project our character into the world and how others in that world perceive us. Social and moral status have drifted steadily apart. Honour is entirely different from entitlement. Fred Goodwin's successor at RBS, Stephen Hester, was entitled to his £1m bonus. But his sense of honour should have told him to waive it when others are enduring such tough times. He did so in the end but too late; an honourable gesture by then looked like political calculation. Similarly, John Terry should have stepped down from the England captaincy before he was pushed, but honour long ago evaporated on Britain's football fields. Pragmatism has overrun principle in so many areas. So Chris Huhne has to resign from the Cabinet, despite his protestations of innocence, because he needs to "avoid distraction". And John Terry's removal is presented by the FA as a footballing judgment as opposed to a moral one. The accusations of racism laid against him might impair his ability to lead and unite his team-mates or "overshadow football business" during the 2012 Euro finals. If honour is to be effective it cannot be imposed from the outside. Reputation may be an external judgement; but honour has to be an internal one. The calculation has to be about what is morally wrong not what is socially unacceptable. In the modern world honour has been externalised. So much so that there are now even companies which you can hire to tout an application for you to be awarded a gong in a forthcoming Honours List. That sort of honour is not a function of social or philanthropic worth; it is a manifestation of wealth and power. It is, as Tennyson might have said, an "honour stood rooted in dishonour". This is a world in which the letter of the law is more important than its spirit. Innocence is less important than getting away with it. And a senior public servant like Ed Lester, the head of the Student Loans Company, sees nothing wrong in having his salary paid through a tax avoidance scheme to divert £40,000 a year, perfectly legally, from the tax authorities into his own pocket. There is honour, it is said, among thieves. But that may be the only place you will find it today.

Hmmm. I think that honour is so far out of fashion that even its defenders get it wrong. Is it honourable never to lie? I don't think so. At a pinch, I'd say that it's perfectly acceptable to lie to a guttersnipe journalist who's just looking to make money from you, while lying to the police could go either way.

I'd say that the concept of honour is a product of two wrongs making a right - the need for the aristocratic system to justify itself by means less tangible than the merely financial. The basis of it is certainly a disdain for worldly profit - that's why hanging onto your bonus or your knighthood is a no-no.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Well, it's a fair point. But at the end of the day, it's only a bauble. Does anyone outside the Telegraph actually care who's a knight of the realm and who isn't? It would have been a different matter had it been a peerage.

A better example would be the "proceeds of crime" act, whatever it is actually called. This allows the state to seize assets that the cops say came from criminal money, even if there isn't enough evidence to support a prosecution. Extremely dodgy, but not much resisted becuase it affects nasty crims, not nice rich kids.