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Honours System (Reform)

: I agree with the thrust of what my hon. Friend said, but I am not sure that I would have made exactly the same observations. In general, when upholding the honours system, its fairness, integrity and so on, we must be careful not to demean our place in our community and democratic structure or to devalue the contribution that many of us make. An interesting thought occurred to me when we talked about people being honoured for charitable work. Given the way in which the honours system aspires to reflect positive values in society, most people would say that that is good. The debate about a tangential issue—party funding—has referred to political parties becoming charities, so would financial contributions to them provide a democratic and legitimate basis for honouring people under the honours system? All sorts of conundrums could be thrown up and we could have a long debate on that, but my central point is that there is nothing wrong with the involvement of politics in the honours system so long as it is transparent and that the final selection is made by a body of people who are not party political.