Please have look dont lock the thread this is the view of many British people why should we honour a man who has no shame and has shown in thought action and deed a complete disregard for the majority of British citizens. Rather than being honoured he should be shown to the war mongering terrorist supporting coward that he really is. Why does he not now stand up and confess his part in the death of 29-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.
It is important to go back to that horrific incident - and to Kennedy's despicable behaviour on the night - to explain why his character alone ought to disqualify him from any British honour, irrespective of his shameful support for the terrorist IRA.
At 12.45am on July 18, 1969, and with Mary Jo in his car, Kennedy - who had been drinking and partying - drove off the Dike Bridge connecting Martha's Vineyard (where the Kennedys had their holiday retreat on America's East coast) with Chappaquiddick Island.
He managed to extricate himself, walk back to his motel, complain to the manager about a noisy party, take a shower, sleep the night, chat to a friend the next morning, order two newspapers, meet his lawyers and finally report the accident to the police at 9.45am.
By then, however, his car had been spotted and Mary Jo's corpse had been found by a fire department diver, Captain John Farrar, at 8.45am.
She had not drowned, but had survived in an air pocket inside the car, only to asphyxiate when the oxygen finally ran out several hours later. The brutal fact is that had Kennedy alerted the police earlier, Mary Jo might be alive today.
She was given no autopsy and Kennedy was not charged with drink-driving, but merely given a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident. To this day, Kennedy has not apologised to Mary Jo's family, and, of course, the tragedy did not for a moment affect his future rampant drinking and womanising.
To bestow such a distinction on a man who has spent almost all his adult life profoundly opposed to the United Kingdom's best interests also makes a mockery of the honours system.
It is true that he lobbied President Clinton hard in 1996 to award Gerry Adams an American visa (Adams promptly used his subsequent U.S. visit to raise money for Sinn Fein) and later to get him invited to the White House. But it is quite wrong to suggest, as the American historian Arthur Schlesinger does, that these initiatives 'led to the IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday accords'.
These, in fact, only came about as a result of the IRA's political and military leadership recognising that they had been defeated on the ground by 1996-98. All that these American invitations afforded Adams, apart from flattering his ego, was to lend Sinn Fein an utterly spurious respectability on the world stage.
Only after 9/11 - when Americans discovered on their own soil how loathsome terrorism truly is, and how far from a noble romantic struggle - did Kennedy cynically distance himself from Adams and fellow Sinn Fein stalwart Martin McGuinness, refusing to meet them in 2005 after the IRA brutally murdered Robert McCartney in a Belfast bar in January that year.
Over all matters concerning Ireland, the Kennedys have taken a pro-Nationalist line that has been deeply antagonistic to the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is why it is absurd for Gordon Brown to make this award, in the words of its official citation, 'for services to U.S.-UK relations and to Northern Ireland'.
For it is no exaggeration to say that Ted Kennedy did his damnedest to poison U.S.-UK relations over Ulster during the long decades in which he has castigated successive British governments. Rather than expressing any genuine commitment to peace in Northern Ireland, he would always play exclusively to his own Catholic-Irish voters in Massachusetts, whom he has represented in the Senate for more than 46 years.
Although he was always careful to use weasel words to condemn violence on both sides, it was always for Britain and the Ulster Protestants that he reserved his most withering rebukes. For the Queen to be obliged to honour this man is nothing less than an obscenity.
He went on to state that the Protestants of Ulster 'should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain'. The fact that they had been in Ulster for 360 years - three times as long as the Kennedys had been in America - clearly passed him by. It was not until St Patrick's Day 1977 that Ted acknowledged that the Protestants might be allowed to remain in their homeland.
It was no coincidence that he raised the flag of Irish nationalism whenever his Senate seat came up for re-election. His call for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1980 was condemned as ignorant grandstanding by the great Irish statesman Conor Cruise O'Brien, but it went down well in the Irish pubs in Boston where money was raised for the shamelessly pro-IRA fundraising organisation Noraid.
