Gordon Brown's government are proposing that an honorary knighthood be bestowed on Senator Ted Kennedy, and we say NO!

For Gordon Brown to propose a knighthood for services to the UK/US relationship and to Northern Ireland is an affront to the thousands of people who suffered and died at the hands of the IRA, an organisation that Ted Kennedy sympathised with during their campaign of terror in the 70s and 80s.

We find it sickening that a man who compared the British Army's presence in Northern Ireland - a part of the United Kingdom - to America's presence in Vietnam is to be knighted by HM Queen Elizabeth II.

We also object to an honorary knighthood being given to a man with a criminal record, convicted for leaving the scene of a crime when Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after the car she was travelling in with Ted Kennedy plunged off a bridge and he failed to report it.

This knighthood is sickening in the extreme. Ted Kennedy is no friend to the British people, and for Gordon Brown and the Labour party to propose the said knighthood is nothing less than malignant.