Why all the fuss about Lynton Crosby getting a knighthood in the New Year’s honours list?
The Telegraph columnist John Mc Ternan says it is fine. After all, what is the honours list for, if not to reward your friends for their help, he argues.
Makes no difference to me. My application to be on The Apprentice was rejected when I kept calling the bearded Cockney ‘Alan’. It seems you are supposed to use the term ‘Lord Sugar’ and pronounce it it a lowered, reverential voice, whenever you speak to him. The hell with that. The Queen may have decided you should be addressed as Lrd Sugar. But we cut off the head of one of her predecessors so that we would not have to do what the aristocracy says.
The New Year’s honours list was announced the same week that David Cameron put out his annual New Year’s message. The BBC reported the message in abbreviated form: they edited it down to ‘tackle poverty and extremism’ as being his bite-size priorities. I almost choked. The guy who wanted to reduce the working tax credits of the poorest families in the country, and was only stopped by popular revulsion at the move, now says he wants to reduce poverty. The cant is unbelievable! (No, that is not a typo.)
And the sanctimonious Mr Cameron also wants to end extremism. So he is bombing Syria. That’ll help.
I’ll tell you what, Dave; try ending poverty in the Middle East and then maybe oppressed and frustrated people will stop looking to feudal religious leaders for leadership and opposition to Western expol=itation and power-mongering in the area. But ending poverty in the middle east would involve ending capitalist exploitation in the area, putting all the natural resources and major industries in the hands of, and under the democratic control of, the working class.
But that sounds a bit like socialism. And that would never do.