Honours must be for the honorable - Apply "The Andrew standard" to Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy

Two recent developments expose a striking double standard as a Belfast judge acquitted a soldier while denouncing the Parachute Regiment's conduct and Buckingham Palace moved swiftly to remove Prince Andrew's styles and honours without a criminal conviction. When state inquiries have found killings unjustified and false accounts were knowingly advanced, the honours granted to those officers should be reconsidered and, where justified, revoked to give victims and their families the truth they were denied.

Verdicts need proof beyond a reasonable doubt; honours are esteem based on virtue.  When the record changes to the point Prime Ministers apologize, so should the honours.

Two developments within days have exposed a double standard of honour in the UK.  In Belfast, a judge acquitted "Soldier F" on criminal charges linked to Bloody Sunday, holding that the prosecution's evidence was insufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  However, in the same ruling, the court said, in substance, that the Parachute Regiment's conduct was unambiguous: troops had "lost all sense of military discipline," were "shooting in the back unarmed civilians fleeing from them on the streets of a British city," and "those responsible should hang their heads in shame." While criminal proof may have failed, the moral and professional guilt was apparent.

Meanwhile, Buckingham Palace has initiated formal proceedings to remove Prince Andrew's style, titles, and honours.  His Order of the Garter banner has been taken down from St George's Chapel; eviction from Royal Lodge is underway.  While Prince Andrew has not been convicted of a crime, the Crown was swift to protect its honours from disrepute in this case.

The record of Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy Massacre is equally disgraceful.  In Derry on 30 January 1972, 1st PARA deployed under the command of Lt. Col. Derek Wilford; Major Ted Loden led Support Company, the unit that opened fire; and Captain Mike Jackson—later General Jackson and overall commander of the British Army—served as adjutant.  What happened tactically—"loss of self-control" and "serious and widespread loss of fire discipline," to quote the Saville report—was followed by a strategically coordinated misinformation operation that perpetuated a false narrative that became the public record for half a century.

A mural dedicated to the Ballymurphy Massacre victims.

Jackson compiled the now-notorious "shot list," a handwritten internal tally of alleged enemy shots and bombs used in early briefings to create a fiction of a running gun battle to cover the "unjustified and unjustifiable" and shape the first-day press line.  Saville rejected those claims, finding that those shot on Bloody Sunday were not posing a threat of causing death or serious injury and that many soldiers knowingly advanced false accounts to justify their firing.  Families have long argued that Jackson's press narrative slandered and libeled their dead and ingrained falsehoods into official memory.

The Saville Inquiry, accepted by then Prime Minister Cameron, found the killings of 14 civilians  in Derry were "unjustified and unjustifiable," that members of the Parachute Regiment "reacted by losing their self-control," and that there was a "serious and widespread loss of fire discipline." Saville also concluded that many soldiers "knowingly put forward false accounts." In June 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron told the Commons and the world: "What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.  It was wrong."

Before Bloody Sunday, there was the Ballymurphy Massacre.  It tells the same story, with the same players, of truth catching up to official fiction.  The Ballymurphy massacre was a series of incidents between 9 and 11 August 1971, involving the same 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, in the killing of eleven civilians in Ballymurphy, Belfast, Northern Ireland.  It was the same regiment and the same officers who would do the same thing in Derry five months later.  It was the same Capt. Mike Jackson, who, as information officer, would transform a priest shot in the back while administering the last rites, a 44-year-old mother of eight shot in the face, and—perhaps most sadly ironic of all—a man killed for allegedly holding a gun in a hand he had lost while serving in the British Army in WWII, into armed threats.  He would persist in these defaming myths even in his autobiography, written over 35 years later.  

In May 2021, the coroner held, as had been the case with Bloody Sunday, that those killed were entirely innocent and that lethal force was unjustified, condemning investigative failures into false narratives that left families carrying slanders for half a century (Ballymurphy Inquests, Keegan J., findings delivered May 2021).  

In May 2021, Prime Minister Boris Johnson "apologised unreservedly on behalf of the state," later telling MPs that "no apology can lessen the lasting pain." Those families spent decades proving what medals and titles sought to obscure. In contrast, some officers spent their careers under the shadow of stolen valor and false narratives that the State later disowned.

In any army, there is no more serious accusation against an officer than losing control of your men; it is a failure as a leader and a breach of the basic responsibility of an officer.  Yet the officers involved in Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday never even received a notation on their records.  Instead, based on the fiction expertly spun by then-Captain Mike Jackson and signed off by his superiors, the honours flowed.  Maj.-Gen. Robert Ford, Commander, Land Forces, Northern Ireland, was awarded a GCB and a CBE.  

Wilford was appointed an OBE within months of Bloody Sunday; contemporaries widely linked it to his Northern Ireland service during that period.  Jackson—the officer whose accounts at Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday were later repudiated by two judicial proceedings, which found the victims innocent and recorded that false accounts were advanced—made out the best of the bunch and was ultimately awarded a knighthood, the GCB, CBE, DSO, and became Chief of the General Staff (the head of the British Army) and Aide-de-Camp General (ADC) to Queen Elizabeth II, in addition to being appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Wiltshire.

Under widely accepted standards of command responsibility and the UK's own leadership doctrine of responsibility and accountability, authoring and sustaining a false operational narrative over years fails the integrity test for honours and compounds the harm to families who not only lost their loved ones unjustifiably, but had their names slandered for decades.

In the United Kingdom, the Sovereign is the fount of honour: the King confers and, as has been shown with Prince Andrew, can cancel honours (and titles).  While criminal courts require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, honours are evaluated based on integrity.  As seen with the former Prince Andrew, it does not require a criminal conviction; it is enough to bring honour into disrepute.

Prince Andrew.

Currently, forfeiture of honours in British practice applies to living holders; posthumous cancellation is unprecedented.  But so too is the scope of prevarication of Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday—state killings the State itself has found unjustified, followed by narratives the State's own inquiry says were knowingly false.  When facts reach that level, precedent cannot be a shield for intentional deception and lies.  The Crown has already shown that unprecedented steps are possible when integrity is at stake: it has removed Prince Andrew's styles, titles, and honours, and removed his Garter banner.  If reputational harm can justify breaking with custom for a prince of the realm, it can justify doing so for officers whose actions and accounts discredited the uniform they wear.

King Charles III is Colonel-in-Chief of The Parachute Regiment, its ceremonial head, keeper of its traditions, and moral custodian.  If Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy are, as the State's own findings say, stains of indiscipline and falsehood, then the King in his role of Colonel-in-Chief is precisely the office that should wipe the stain—by supporting formal forfeiture and unequivocal historical censure.

King Charles III and Camilla.

This is not an exercise in "woke canceling." These are not events that occurred hundreds of years ago under different value systems; they occurred in living memory, where families still feel the pain.  It is a duty to future history to correct the record now before it hardens into myth.  We want these men remembered, but accurately, as a lesson in hubris, indiscipline, command failure, and deceit.

For fifty years, families have had to refute slanders layered over grief, while senior officers lived decorated lives built on false narratives that inquiries have now disowned.  If a prince of the realm can be formally stripped to protect the monarchy's integrity, then certainly the awards granted based on slander and libel to cover the murder of innocent civilians should also merit removal.  Murder and deception should not be hidden behind titles.