The Evil Twin of Gunga Din

You may talk o' your fair share

When you're quartered safe out there,

An’ you send for more champagne an’ pension pot it.

But when it comes to money,

We no longer find it funny

When you take the bleedin’ shirt off us that’s got it.

Now, in Blighty’s rainy clime,

Where we now all spend our time

A bailin’ out 'Er Majesty the Queen,

Of all them smug-faced crew,

The vilest man I knew,

Was that mercenary scoundrel Fred Goodwin.

Hungry? Eat the rich

Crivvens, verily and foresooth, Fred Goodwin's been stripped of his knighthood. We might as well go home, lads. The revolution’s over and the good guys won. That £14 million pension pot and guaranteed, index-linked £340K a year for life will be scant recompense for his being addressed as Mister by the few people who like him; the rest of us already had a suitable title for him, one in the vernacular idiom, and he's keeping it but he’ll never have to stand in a dole queue with us.

Of course, the very idea that the man should have been accorded any enhanced status by endorsement of the state as proxy of the crown - or vice versa; these things are never clear - given what we now know of his record over the piece, offends most sensibilities, but in a country where traditions of state ceremony are as fiercely protected as they are here, this compulsion must surely be consistent if nothing else. The prime function of the ceremonial state is to define and maintain its structures; evenhandedness is more than just an imperative, it is its very purpose. Surely in a country as fond of pomp as these sceptred isles there should be protocol for such eventualities?

So long as there exists a suitable reciprocal procedure in event of the dishonouring of a title, one which is accorded equal status with the original investiture, I‘m all in favour of the honours system (with some essential modifications and redefinition of what constitutes outstandingly honourable deeds, naturally) Ordinary citizens on minimal incomes who work for£20 cash undeclared can expect to have their benefits stopped and to be vilified in the press and pub. The disabled know better than to venture outside at all, as the presence of a pulse is now considered clear evidence of fraud of the sort the tabloids and their readership salivate over.