Whilst anger mounts, over the planned honouring of “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie, the British Government has stood by the decision and denounced the international protests by claiming, “We have a tolerance of other people’s point of view and we don’t apologise for that.”

The statement was issued by the British Home Secretary John Reid, with the Pakistan National Assembly calling the Queens honour to Rushdie, “an insult to the religious sentiments of Muslims”, with an Iranian organisation apparently placing an £80,000 “bounty” on the writers head.

Salman Rushdie is not unaware of the scandal which he does cause, for having written the Satanic Verses, a Fatwa was issued by the Iranian regime during the 1980’s, for the books alleged insults to Islam.

The action has been viewed by some people as direct incitement by the British, to provoke a hostile reaction from the Iranian regime although it has been viewed by others, that this has come in light of the controversy which was made over the detention of the British servicemen, who allegedly sailed into Iranian waters whilst on patrol in Iraq.

Joseph Corre, the co-founder of the lingerie company Agent Provocateur was also awarded a Member of the British Empire (MBE) by the Queen, for his services to the fashion industry but has refused the title on the grounds that Tony Blair is “morally corrupt.”

Corre explained in an interview: “I have been chosen by an organisation headed by a Prime Minister who I find morally corrupt - who has been involved in organised lying, to the point where thousands of people, including children, have suffered death, detention and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The honouring of Rushdie, for his alleged services to literature has seen the burning of the British flag, alongside effigies of both Salmon Rushdie and Queen Elizabeth. This has also been followed by media coverage depicting the “mad mullah” and taking up space that could otherwise be used to highlight the fact, that in the UK, an estimated “One in 10 young people suffers from significant mental health problems”.

The Children Charity, The NCH, have also declared that: "The lack of emotional well-being amongst our children and young people is undermining the foundations of any social policy to combat social exclusion, deprivation or lack of social mobility."

According to the NCH “The problems of child poverty and social exclusion have persisted from the Victorian era.” Such statements within the UK, do have a tendency to conjure up the vivid images of poverty and squalor, projected by long lasting and genuinely good writers, such as Charles Dickens, North and South author Elizabeth Gaskell and the revolutionary Communist Frederick Engel’s.

Having written “Conditions of the English Working Class” at the age of 24, in 1844 Engel’s gave an early account of working class life in Victorian Britain, as being “A horde of ragged women and children (who) swarm about, as filthy as the swine that thrive on the garbage heaps and in the puddles“…”The race that lives in these ruinous cottages behind broken windows”… “or in dark cellars in measureless stench and filth”…”must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.”

According to R.J.Cootes, in his book “The Making of the Welfare State”, published by Longmans in 1966, “Engel’s was not exaggerating”. Cootes explained the period which Engel’s described, where in the Northern city of Manchester, “over sixty babies, out of every hundred born, died before the age of five”, whilst “in Liverpool, one family in five lived in a damp, dark cellar. Cholera and other killing diseases raged in the towns-encouraged by the appalling lack of sanitation.”

Modern authors such as Pat Barker, have helped to revolutionize Western literature and have developed real life experiences into an art form, that not only strikes a collective conscience within Britain but has also empowered people into taking action against the destructive elements of war.

Being described by the Scotsman as being an author who “probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden”, Pat Barkers highly acclaimed book Another World, tells the haunting story of 101 year old Geordie, a Somme Veteran, who in the run up to his death is being haunted by the “ghosts of the trenches” from World War One.

Most families within the UK, are able to connect with such stories, of relatives who fought in the trenches and may be able to recall conversations of family members speaking of the deaths, the “shell shock” and the post traumatic stress, which men returned home with.

Other families may also recall how entire generations of men and young boys were wiped out in the Great War, a war which apparently was also meant to “end all others”.

Barker‘s book explains a situation from the perspective of Geordies grandson, who claims, “It’s too easy to dismiss somebody else’s lived experience as a symptom of this, that or the other pathology: to label it, disinfect it, store it away neatly in slim buff files and prevent it making dangerous contact with the experiences of normal people”.

In the Regeneration Trilogy, Barker also describes how British intelligence had formulated “plots” by the anti-war movement, to kill the Prime Minister of the day Lloyd George, with a poisoned dart, thus apparently bringing about an end to World War One.

“The poison plot fitted nicely with pre-conceptions about the anti-war movement.” Says Barker, who is explaining to the reader the thoughts of Regeneration’s main character Billy Prior. He “was used to thinking of politics in terms of conflicting interests, but what seemed to have happened here was less a conflict of interests than a disastrous meshing together of fantasies.”

Unlike the Britain, which mobilised over two-million people against the illegal invasion of Iraq, Salmon Rushdie is receiving his award for his apparent contribution to literature, from a “morally corrupt” leader, who according to a recent Observer poll, revealed that “58 % of British people thought the destruction of Iraq, was Blair’s failed legacy,”

Blair’s Labour government, was also criticised by the UN, who in February stated that, “Children growing up in the United Kingdom suffer greater deprivation, worse relationships with their parents and are exposed to more risks from alcohol, drugs and unsafe sex than those in any other wealthy country in the world.”

This unsophisticated Blair’s Britannia, will be remembered in time, as nothing more than a “disastrous meshing together of fantasies”, of “dodgy dossiers“, “illegal wars“, “traumatised Iraqi‘s”, “a war criminal prime minister” and the “cash for honours scandal” but as Leon Trotsky declared in 1924, “Every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art”, for Blair and Labour it’s Salman Rushdie.

As Trotsky explained: “To understand and perceive truly, not in a journalistic way but to feel to the very bottom, the section of time in which we live, one has to know the past of mankind, its life, its work, its struggles, its hopes, its defeats and its achievements.”

“First of all, one has to know the history of mankind and the laws, the concrete facts, the picturesqueness and the personalities of contemporary life.” But as Trotsky also concluded:“It would also follow from this, that the proletariat of the world has to create its own culture and also its own art.”