When you think of the word Knight, most of our brains conjure up the image of a brave warrior from our childhood stories, clad in armour, ready to defend a vulnerable maiden from a hungry dragon.
We wouldn’t immediately think of Iain Duncan Smith, a man who looks like he accelerates while laughing through puddles when he sees elderly people walking on the pavement, exuding all the charm and desirability of wet pleurisy.
So the news this morning that he is to be knighted has been met with considerable anger from the public, and for good reason. When he was the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Duncan Smith was culpable for the implementation of Universal Credit, bedroom tax and welfare reform that has been said to be responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of poor, sick and disabled citizens. His policies were the jewel in the crown of the systematic, institutional cruelty that the Conservative Party has forced onto the head of the British public over the last nine years.
But we shouldn’t been surprised. Knighthoods are not the symbols of nobility told to us in fairytales. When you think about it, they’ve always been given to those who were really good at killing people on behalf of the monarchy or state, so who would be a better candidate than he? Even if we are doing ourselves a disservice by not forcing him into a suit of armour and making him fight Brienne of Tarth for the title.
He’s just one in a long line of over privileged sociopaths we have rewarded for their complete absence of decency or empathy, including topsy turvy fascist overlord Benito Mussolini, who was given the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1923. It was revoked again in 1940 as declaring war on Britain was considered too big a misdemeanour to overlook.
Then there was the time Robert Mugabe was given honours in the hope it might chill him the fuck out a bit. Because bestowing more dubious privileged titles to a man with full blown dictator syndrome that already feels entitled to murder and torture his own people is known to have a very soothing effect.
The honours have always been a symbol of privilege, empire and colonialism, which is why they have been refused by a small number of well known figures such as Ken Loach and Benjamin Zephaniah. While some titles are given to extraordinarily decent members of our society for the work they do in our communities, it’s a token gesture only and does not give true recognition for the things they achieve.
Why don’t we just drop the façade and dish them out to every complete bastard we can think of? Sir Tekashi69 and Dame Woman who hoyed Lola the cat in the bin in 2010.
Hopefully we can do away with this aristocratic backslapping for good one day. For now I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that a 93 year old woman with a sword that close to Duncan-Smith’s head couldn’t possibly have that much of a steady hand.
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