Another year, another annoying New year’s Honours List without my name in it. I’ve done so much in my life, admittedly mostly for money, but here’s the thing: I’ve been volunteering at a food bank for about ten weeks now. Surely that deserved something? I’m only kidding. I don’t deserve a gong at all. I worked as I hard as I could for well over 40 years and that was it. Aside from work, I had no special talents or ability, as this blog merely confirms. It’s fair that I didn’t get a gong. I’m not entirely sure how some folk deserved theirs.
Take Sir Bufton Tufton, MP for Borsetshire. I know that he’s a Private Eye invention, but he will have got a gong today. Numerous MPs will have got assorted gongs, including knighthoods, for being MPs. Senior civil servants will get the highest honours for being senior civil servants. These are known in the civil service as OBEs: other buggers’ efforts. Read the list and weep. It even includes some high-up MOD wallah who orders submarines. Again I say, that’s his actual job. But in Britain, for the upper orders getting paid is never enough.
Ah yes, I hear you say. There are numerous lollipop women and men and humble folk who have spent a lifetime doing good things because that’s what they do. They get awards, too. Well, some of them do. Take Rosalie Whitlock. You won’t have heard of her – I certainly hadn’t – but she joined the RNLI as a fundraiser in 1970 and became the Penlee Lifeboat Station’s fundraising secretary in 1975. The branch has raised over £2 million since she became secretary. Rosalie was heavily involved in the support operation following the Penlee lifeboat disaster of 1981 where 16 people lost their lives. At 68, she has finally been recognised with a British Empire Medal. Not a damehood or a CBE,OBE or MBE but something much more minor. When a politician or a bean counter gets a big honour, the little people who make life worthwhile pick up the scraps.
Even well known people seem to miss out. Take the late Doddie Weir, who died of MND after an heroic campaign to raise money to find a cure, Rob Burrow who suffers from this most cruel of diseases who continues to campaign and Burrow’s friend Kevin Sinfield, who carries out exceptional work and raises millions. Why were these three not knighted long ago? You will surely know of someone else who deserves to be recognised but hasn’t been, while some tiresome old MP slumbers on the backbenches and for that carries a ‘Sir’ before his name. Arise Sir Bufton Tufton for services to – hmm, let me think about that one.
Shouldn’t we have some kind of national debate about the honours system? Do we want to carry on ploughing the same old furrow, award gongs to Brian Harold May, despite giving us some of the worst music in the history of music? Okay, we might not necessarily agree with the quality or otherwise of Queen’s music, but why does he get a knighthood while an heroic fundraiser gets a mere BEM? Moreover, why do so many people get gongs for simply going to work and others get nothing, or next to nothing, for doing things that literally make lives better and in some instances literally save them?
Nothing will change because the current system suits the establishment. Sure, they have gone some distance to ensure women are recognised equally to men and the same applies to those we call minorities. But the fault line remains. The system mostly rewards the establishment it serves. And if the price of maintaining the illusion of fairness involves tossing a few minor gongs to the lower orders, then so be it.
