HC Deb 04 August 1925 vol 187 cc1316-9

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause stand part of the Rill."

Sir GERALD STRICKLAND

I wish to appeal to the Minister in charge of the Bill to amend this Clause. The Clause itself is inefficient, especially when read with the rest of the Bill. The drawback of providing an inefficient remedy for this very grave evil will be to dull the sense of the necessity for providing a remedy. The Amendment I would suggest would be that instead of creating a new statutory misdemeanour an enactment should be provided allowing a sufficiently high penalty to a common informer. I have seen as a Governor many crooked things attempted in connection with the grant of honours or the withholding of the same, and I am convinced of the reluctance of the Public Prosecutor to initiate proceedings. It is not merely the sale of honours as they stand, with regard to which we have seen published in the newspapers an established tariff for peerages, knighthoods, and so on, but a new difficulty has arisen in connection with appointments to Australian governorships.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN

The Bill does not deal with the appointment of Governors of the Dominions.

Sir G. STRICKLAND

Those who are in favour of stopping this traffic should make the Bill stronger. Those who are in favour of it continuing with more impunity than ever before, should vote for the Bill as it is. If the Government are really determined to get rid of it, they must provide for penalties to be recoverable by common informers.

Clause 2 (Short Title) ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Bill reported, without Amendment.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read the Third time."

Mr. J. JONES

Some of us will appreciate the buying and selling of honours. A large number of those who have the opportunity of possessing titles are not entitled. I am speaking of the Bill on which the hon. Member for Lancaster (Sir G. Strickland) has been speaking. I do not know what he was talking about, but I understand he was dealing with the question of the corruption that has set into the body politic, mostly supported by the people with whom he is generally associated. A cancer has come into the Government of Great Britain, and retired soap makers and glorified grocers can become Lords of the realm and can buy up the land of Great Britain and make the rest of the people their slaves, by Letters Patent. You have only to be successful in business, without anything of a genealogical tree. Some of them boast about being their father's sons, and some of them would have difficulty in proving it. Still, they are Lords of the realm. They can go into another place and tell us what we should do. And they are doing us all the time. All we ask is that these reports that have been presented to us in Bills of this character shall at least recognise that there is only one nobility, and that is nobility in character. The champions of the Divorce Court can be members of the House of Lords, men who can win a long-distance race in the number of wives they can have. Yes, and there are newspaper proprietors in another place who wallow in filth every week at twopence a time, and a dividend of 25 per cent. is declared upon their shares with a bonus of 5 per cent. They are noblemen. We are only the down-and-outs, the common people who do not know anything about night clubs, except what we read in the newspapers. It does not matter what hon. Members think about us; we are clean.

As far as this Bill is concerned, I support the hon. Member for Lancaster. He has got a title because he has worked for it. Other people get titles because they have not worked for them. They get other people to do it for them. Although the hon. Member has not expressed himself so gracefully as I Have, I am glad to support him in his opposition to giving honours or titles to any man or woman who has not rendered service. I am willing to honour either the man or the woman who renders service. I never expect to get any honour. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why not?"] I have got some.

Those honours are given to me by the men and women in the district in which I live, fairly and honestly, by a democratic vote. They are not given to me from the top. All the honours are given to me from the bottom. That is where I want all the honours to come from. They have been given by the workers whom I appreciate and whom we all appreciate. I know very well that hon. Gentlemen opposite imagine the giving of honours to be the right of the person who happens to be at the head of the State, but so far as the workers of this country are concerned we have got to this stage that we believe in honouring every man or woman who performs useful service to the State. Honours should be given for services rendered and not because a man is his father's son or claims to be. Whatever a man's state or calling may be, if he renders service to the State he should be honoured accordingly.

Therefore I protest in common with my Friend, who, of course, is more closely related to the aristocracy than I am. My aristocracy in Silvertown are not very extensive. They could not publish their escutcheons and coats of arms, but if you want to meet those of the bulldog breed, come to where the workers work and live. Therefore I associate myself with my hon. Friend in his protest against the giving of honours to people who are not entitled to them, simply because they subscribe or do something of that kind. When a man gets a title in that way, who is to find out how he gets his title? Who knows what subterranean influences have been at work so that he may afterwards be able to say, "I am one of the elect. I have the right to govern because I do not know how to govern. I am one of the men who are supposed to have blue blood in my veins"? I hope that I have not any. I hope that mine is red. There is only one kind of blood worth having—clean blood, blood of the common people, the people who have made all the Governments and done all the work. We want nobility no longer therefore to be a question of ancestry. My ancestral tree would not bear investigation. What we want is that the worth of people should no longer be recognised because of what was done in times past, but on account of work which is done in the present and work which has to be done in the future. The type of the real nobility is the working class, which is no class, but is the nation. All other classes live on it.