Here is the editorial about it in the Guardian (England)Hizzoner gets a gong But why not honour all New Yorkers? suggesting it should have been a George Cross for New York as a whole, like Malta in the War.
Isn't it about time they made the City of New York a State? That'd be a fitting thing to do maybe.
Leader: Hizzoner gets a gong
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at .
History will probably - though not certainly - judge Rudolph Giuliani as one of the great mayors of New York City. His eight years in the official residence at Gracie Mansion have been years of economic and social rebirth for his dynamic city, although it is important to recall that they have also been regularly marred by controversy and that many other US cities have managed to transform themselves in the past 10 years without Mr Giuliani's help or his headlines. Since September 11, though, there can be no argument. Mr Giuliani has been an inspiration at home and abroad but, most of all, in the place where it has mattered most - in New York itself. Hizzoner has risen to the occasion.Not even the current worldwide wave of Giuliani admiration, though, should justify the British government's decision to give the mayor an honorary knighthood. Do not get this wrong. Britain should certainly find a way to honour New York in its time of trial. But there are better alternatives. As we argued here last month, an award to the people of New York - and especially to its emergency services - would be particularly appropriate. The George Cross - this country's highest civilian award for gallantry - would be an imaginative people-to-people choice.
The Giuliani knighthood is the latest in a string of knighthoods conferred by recent British governments on Americans including Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, Colin Powell and, most recently, Bob Hope and Steven Spielberg. Unfortunately, the Blair government, which is supposedly innovative and modern in its approach to the honours system, is as bad if not worse than its predecessors. No disrespect intended to Mr Giuliani, but the system is getting tacky and is beginning to verge on the corrupt. This increasing one-way transatlantic trade in personal honours does no credit to either the giver or to the receiver, and it should be stopped.