Honours and Justice

Everyday Ethics

In the past week, BAFTA said the convicted criminal Huw Edwards will be allowed to keep the seven individual awards that he won in the 40 years he worked for the BBC, fronting some of the biggest news stories during that time.

Edwards was given a six month suspended sentence this year after he admitted accessing and making indecent images of children as young as seven

While BAFTA have decided that he can keep them, but that from next year they will revoke prizes if a recipient is subsequently jailed for at least three months - suspended or otherwise - or have been proven to have cheated in their work.

The narrow question this morning is should BAFTA have applied this rule retrospectively in the face of such a serious conviction for Edwards? Or if he was never viewed as a role model, should the work that he did be separated from the character of the man who did it? When is it legitimate to remove someone's honours?

The wider question is whether in today's world, where we have seen distinguished art institutions refuse money from companies with image problems, to social media activists removing a platform from 'unfashionable' speakers, are we witnessing a new secular puritanism?

Is this a new and welcome moral clarity or a narrow-minded and self-defeating intolerance of life's ambiguities and those not fully signed up to an approved point of view?

Audrey Carville is joined by Professor of Sociology at Queen's University Gladys Ganiel, author and journalist Mihir Bose, and former Presbyterian Moderator the Reverend Norman Hamilton.