The New Year’s Honours have been published and Baroness Floella Benjamin becomes a Dame for services to charity.
The former Play School presenter, now a Lib Dem Peer, spent the weekend after the election on the phone consoling defeated Lib Dem candidates. A friend of mine who received a call from her was absolutely delighted.
Kishan Devani, who joined us from the Conservatives a couple of years ago and was our candidate in Montgomeryshire at the election gets a British Empire Medal. Thanks to Peter Taylor for telling us.
To those of you that said this is not my country:
I've only gone & been awarded a Queen's Honour & made a BEM (British Empire Medal) For Services to Community Cohesion – in the Queen's New Year's Honours List 2020! Thank you @RoyalFamily & @cabinetofficeuk!#NewYearsHonoursList pic.twitter.com/LHUQNrWDM7
— Professor Kishan Devani BEM (@Kishan_Devani) December 27, 2019
I’ve had a look for political service and local government and can’t find any other Liberal Democrats, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. Please let us know in the comments if you find any more.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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24 Comments
Wonderful a great lady and ambassador for the LibDems.
Two people truly deserving of recognition of their work in the community.
BEM to Lib Dem Cllr Vivienne Rees, South Lakeland DC for services to the community in Cumbria. Congratulations Vivienne
All 3 very well deserved !!!
It really is time to update and refine (abolish ?) the honours system. If I was of BAME background I’m not sure what I’d make of a gong inscribed ‘FOR GOD AND THE EMPIRE’.
The B.E.M. was abolished by John Major for perfectly sound liberal reasons in the 1990’s- but it was reintroduced by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition in 2011. This was probably well intentioned but it wasn’t one of the ‘great achievements’ of that unfortunate government……. nor today is the award of a knighthood to the designer of the dreadful Universal Credit which went through on the same government’s watch.
https://www.performingartistes.co.uk/artistes/kishan-devani
There must be hundreds of Lib Dems eligible for the honours list. It needs to be taken out of politics and handed to a body that determines worth on a non-partisan basis. This might also help with Lords reform.
When I was a member of the Passenger Transport Authority I felt very proud of my free countywide travel card. Presenting it to a bus driver at any hour of the day felt like a great honour. How about giving a certain cash value to awards – like a national rail card or a free television licence? In order to give due respect to the nation’s finances they could be restricted in number (like the Order of the Garter) or time-limited (like a passport). On second thoughts perhaps I’ll just agree with David Raw!
@ Geoff Reid I’d be very happy for Sopwith Camel, Guilty bystander and Anthony H to be given free travel cards this Christmas, Geoff. As a Yorkshireman happily living in very civilised and welcoming social democratic Scotland, I’d hope it would get them further than their natural home in the Scilly Isles.
David how do you know Stopwith is a Camel being a jolly jack jar he is much more likely to be a Pup. After all the Pup was the first aircraft to land on a naval ship.
@David Raw: Not sure what i’ve done to deserve being sent to the Scilly Isles.
As for ‘Social Democratic’ – I’d class myself as such, and would vote for such a party if it stood in my constituency. The Lib dems don’t qualify, having excised the SDP element over the last decade, and seem to be gleefully embracing the old ‘Liberal’ tag. As for Scotland being social democratic – under the SNP? Rubbish: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/if-you-think-snp-are-left-wing-force-think-again
Scrap the lot! Those who actually serve the community don’t need them and those who are self-serving don’t deserve them..
Ben Jennings (Guardian) cartoon, regarding Iain Duncan Smith’s knighthood, should give anyone accepting an ‘honour’ pause for thought.
I joined the party (briefly) in 2015 as I was appalled by the prospect of 20 years of Tory rule (Labour looking unelectable and on a death ride).
I soon gave up when it dawned on me that the party has no serious political ambitions despite claims otherwise and the expenditure of countless thousand of activist hours. It is more of a social club for intellectuals.
This forum should be a safe place for the party to hear some messages that might explain how, after 50 years of devoted effort, the party has gone from 12 seats to 11.
And the opinions politely offered by those so sneeringly denounced above are 100% centre ground views and the evidence for that is the Tories have 365 seats.
FPTP is not an inherently unfair system. The LibDems have a good “ground game” and ought to be able to steadily supplant the weaker of the other two, constituency by constituency.
But it chooses not to. Mr. Raw and Mr. Frankie show what the party feels about the centre of the political spectrum. A three year campaign of insult against 17 million ordinary voters and an emphatic repudiation of their views clearly shows that the centre of the political spectrum is not where the party wants to be but rather to create a bubble of its own and expects the people to join it.
The Scots have a third force to move to, and they have. The rest of us don’t, despite our desire for it. The tragedy is that the LibDems don’t want to be that force.
The SNP broke through under “First Past The Post” because in 2014 there was a Referendum, a sort of Election campaign that had The SNP on one side & almost all The other Parties on the other. The campaign sent Voters a clear message that The SNP was as important as the rest combined.
The 2016 Euro-Referendum didnt do the same for us because we were at our lowest point for a quarter of a Century & because both Labour & Tories claimed to be on both sides at once.
Its too soon to say if our attempt to emulate The SNP tactic has failed; Brexit is very far from over. It looks like the depth of The Brexit crisis will come in about 9 or 10 Months time as “No-Deal Brexit” becomes the likely result. At that point we will still be the Leading Anti-Brexit Party in England, The Government will be a “No-Deal” government & Labour will be sitting on a fence of some sort.
To me there seems a very good case for doubling down on our Anti-Brexit line, at least for the coming Year.
@ Paul Barker “The SNP broke through under “First Past The Post” because in 2014…”
Not so… The SNP took power at Holyrood in 2007 under a PR system.
@Paul The difference being that the SNP merely claimed winning most of the seats gave them a mandate for another referendum. They were never so stupid as to suggest that winning the seats should enable them to implement what they want regardless.
What reason the knighthood is offered to Iain Duncan Smith, the trite, political, public service, his appalling design of the terrible changes in tax credits and benefits, becoming the fiasco of the current system, makes a nonsense of.
I disagree with David above when he says we might think to abolish honours, they are good for morale, personal, national. I could not agree with him with greater enthusiasm, though, with the award to this wretched former minister.
We see awards debauched too often .
We are likely to see Dame Katie Price rather than Dame Katie Piper, Sir Simon Cowell, before Sir Simon Weston! Disgraceful!
Sir Iain Duncan Smith cannot disassociate the bad ones from the good, we take them as we find them, because it has no bearing on these deserved awards to colleagues mentioned, we congratulate, for their work for their community.
@ Lorenzo Cherin 31st Dec ’19 – 2:00am
” What reason the knighthood is offered to Iain Duncan Smith, the trite, political, public service, his appalling design of the terrible changes in tax credits and benefits, becoming the fiasco of the current system, makes a nonsense of.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith cannot disassociate the bad ones from the good, we take them as we find them, because it has no bearing on these deserved awards to colleagues mentioned, we congratulate, for their work for their community.”
And yet within days of the election your temporary leader SIR Ed Davey(what did he get it for by the way) was advocating that your useless ex leader Jo Swinson should be brought straight back into parliament with a life peerage, because apparently she has so much to offer. I won’t mention her performance during the coalition, but her outright rejection of the democratic decision of 2016 with her Revoke policy should bar her permanently from any democratic forum, or for that matter even undemocratic ones like the House of Lords which although LIbDems apparently abhor, were willing participants in exploiting its undemocratic credentials, by using their over-represented block to try and undermine the Brexit process. I am no supporter of honours to anybody who got it for doing their paid day job, nobody in the public sector should get these tokens( bribes) for just carrying out the job they are paid to do. It is however chutzpah indeed to be critical of the award to Ian Duncan Smith, when your party has its fair share of enobled and knighted politicians like your current temporary leader and your recent retired leader who as as far as I can tell have achieved precisely nothing for the greater good. If performance was the measure for an award, there would barely be an ex politician in the House of Lords.
“The LibDems have a good “ground game””
What is the evidence for this?
Over the last decade net gains in just three of ten sets of local elections, net losses at general elections in – not just 2015 – but 2010 and 2019, just two of the seats held in 2015 have been held at the two subsequent general elections, you have to go back to 2006 to the last time the party won a by-election in a seat it didn’t either hold at a parliamentary level (Eastleigh and B&R) or held up to the previous election (Richmond).
The ‘strong ground game’ was going to save the party in 2015 (see this thread – https://www.libdemvoice.org/why-i-am-cursing-tim-gordon-44631.html – for just one of the many times that was claimed by the editors on this site) and was going to prove the polls wrong in 2019 – and it just didn’t materialise.
That is a long pattern which does little to show a strong pattern of a game changing ‘ground game’ – if the party is to change that needs to be recognised and accepted as the first step to changing things.
Hywel,
My meaning was that the party has plenty of activists. LibDem leaflets far outweighed those of the other parties that arrived through my letter box. (They still lost).
Whether these soldiers are being ably led by adroit and effective generals is another matter all together.
Sopwith Morley
Do not think me against some of those comments, I support the crossbenchers in the Lords and do not want a one hundred per cent party political upper chamber as we need expertise that is fair but this need and should not mean political cronyism.
If Ed Davey thinks Jo Swinson ought to be in the Lords , he is mistaken.
“If Ed Davey thinks Jo Swinson ought to be in the Lords , he is mistaken.”
He certainly is. But has he said that? I haven’t seen it anywhere.
I think Ken Loach, whose films centre on social issues such as poverty and homelessness got it right, when he refused an honour and said about the honours system, “It’s all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.
Or Jim Broadbent, who also refused an honour, when he said about fellow actors “We’re vagabonds and rogues, and we’re not a part of the authorities and establishment, really. If you mix the two together, things get blurry.”
If only there were more prominent Liberal Democrats who shared those views rather than approved and participated in the system, which many feel is not the big issue, but is one of the many things wrong in British society today and I am disappointed every year when Lib Dem Voice joins in with celebrations of those who become part of the honours system, rather than standing up against an outdates system of patronage which encourages loyalty to those who do not rock the boat. .
IS THIS SOMETHING OUR POLITICIANS SHOULD BE QUESTIONING?……………….
(Our new Government is legislating in favour of a particular pressure group after that pressure group gave its support in the General Election).
Why is our soon-to-be very busy new Tory Government making a particular point of finding time to ban UK Public Bodies from endorsing Boycotts Divestment and Sanctions, (BDS), against “foreign states”?
Many Jews and others are supporting BDS against a Zionist Israeli State and particularly exports form the (illegally-) Occupied Territories. What is the general public to make of our Government siding with the (Palestinian-) Human Rights abusing, Settler-Colonial, (in the words of Jewish Voice for Peace and other Jews), movement of modern Zionism? It seems that this extraordinary move by the new Government is suspiciously like a reward for the Zionist-supporting Chief Rabbi’s trashing of an alleged “anti-Semitic”, (certainly anti-Zionist), supporters of Labour including leader Jeremy Corbyn himself.
Alternatively, it is quite possible that the Tory commitment to ban BDS was a pre-condition for the Chief Rabbi’s actions.