A Conservative peer is suing the Prime Minister in a free speech row after he was stripped of his CBE for comments he made on social media.
Lord Rami Ranger, 78, who was appointed to the House of Lords in 2019 by then PM Theresa May, is fighting to have his ‘Commander of the British Empire’ honour restored.
The multi-millionaire businessman and founder of Sun Mark claims he is a victim of ‘cancel culture’ behind closed doors after what has been dubbed a ‘shadowy’ government committee revoked it.
He was left ‘deeply embarrassed and distressed’ when it was reported publicly in the London Gazette in December 2024 that ‘the King has directed that… [the CBE] shall be cancelled and annulled and that his name shall be erased from the Register of the said Order’.
He claims comments that led to him being stripped of the award for bringing the honours system into disrepute were the result of ‘heated political debate’ or else arose from ‘personal disputes’ and were legitimate.
Lord Ranger, who started consumer goods and shipping giant Sun Mark with just £2 capital, is said to have told friends that it was an ‘extreme penalty’ when he had never been convicted of a criminal offence.
And he warns that the threat of being officially cancelled for speaking your mind and humiliated will deter other public figures from speaking out on issues they feel passionately about.
He is now taking his battle to the High Court next week.
Conservative peer Lord Rami Ranger is suing the Prime Minister over a free speech row after he was stripped of his CBE for comments he made on social media
Lord Ranger claimed he was a victim of a ‘cancel culture’ within Keir Starmer’s government
Backing his campaign to have his honour restored, Free Speech Union Founder Lord Young of Acton said that ‘ruthlessly stripping’ Lord Ranger of his CBE over ‘perfectly lawful’ comments was ‘beyond the pale’.
Chairman of the British Sikh Association, Lord Ranger was awarded his CBE in 2016 for services to business and community cohesion, but it was stripped from him by a government committee set up to look into potential breaches made by honour holders called the Forfeiture Committee.
Overseen by the Cabinet Office, the committee is ultimately answerable to the Prime Minister and holds its meetings strictly in private.
It acted after the House of Lords standards watchdog ruled that Lord Ranger, a philanthropist and Conservative Party donor, who was born in India, had breached its Code of Conduct in a social media spat with an Indian journalist.
It found he had harassed and bullied Poonam Joshi, in a series of tweets where he called her a ‘presstitute’ – a slur commonly used in India against journalists who criticise the ruling BJP government – and that he falsely claimed on social media that Ms Joshi had reported her BBC presenter husband for domestic abuse.
The peer issued a public apology to Ms Joshi after it was ruled that he had abused his position of power as a member of the House of Lords to undermine, humiliate and denigrate her. He also promised to go on a social media training course to re-educate himself.
Previous controversial social media comments he has apologised for, including remarks about Sikh separatists and Pakistanis, are also thought to have come under the Forfeiture Committee’s lens.
However, it did not strip him of his MBE, awarded in 2005 for services to business, which he still holds.
Lord Ranger, Director of Sun Mark, in his warehouse in Greenford
Lord Ranger’s lawyers say next week’s legal case will test the Government’s right to ‘cancel an individual’ rather than protect the right to free speech.
They say taking away his CBE was ‘disproportionate’ to what he had done, that the committee’s decision was flawed and based on unreliable or inaccurate information presented to it and that it overstepped its authority in taking the action.
While the committee is empowered to remove honours from individuals, its website says that ‘personal disputes are not likely to be a reason to forfeit an honour’.
Meanwhile it automatically examines cases where individuals have been jailed or committed sexual offences or have been disbarred by professional bodies.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Lord Ranger’s solicitor Mark Lewis said it ‘would not be appropriate to comment on the facts of the case whilst it is ongoing’, but added, ‘It is interesting to see what, if any, legal constraints there are to governments adopting cancel culture over freedom of speech.’
Anil Bhanot, a founding member of the Hindu Council, was also stripped of his honour in December 2024 when his OBE was taken away by the Forfeiture Committee for comments made on social media following the killings of Hindus by ‘mobs of Islamists’ in Bangladesh.
Baron Young dubbed it ‘a shadowy committee, deep in the recesses of Whitehall’ which ‘has become an enforcer of establishment orthodoxy, ruthlessly stripping people of their honours for expressing perfectly lawful views that it regards as beyond the pale’.
‘If people knew that receiving an OBE or a CBE was accompanied by a muzzle, with the risk that if you stray outside the Overton window [the political mainstream] you could lose it, I doubt many people would accept them in the first place,’ he said.
