Not Honours, but Scorn
Failure should not be rewarded. Justice demands generations of Establishment honours be revoked.
‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ - Margaret Mead.
It is right and necessary to strip from the Establishment those honours they have awarded themselves. It is right because of the grand careless failure they have presided over. When we look at the mess they’ve made of housing, energy, health, transport, industry, the environment, education, social and national harmony, liberty, the public finances, and democracy itself, they deserve from the rest of us not honour, but reproach and rejection.
Have they brought honour to the country? They have not. When I consider the decades of neglect, purposeful policy-driven neglect, inflicted on whole regions of the North, for example, I finally feel disgust for the generations of politicians and time-servers who allowed it. What the Establishment should wear on their chests are not badges of honour, but shame.
So here’s my proposal: that we should open a campaign to mark that shame, by stripping the generation of ‘public servants’ of honours they do not deserve to hold. By public servants I mean senior civil servants, including those leading faux-charities surviving on public subsidy, and the politicians who front for them. Yes, it should be retrospective going back through the decades of mis-governance: a judgement on them by the country they mis-governed. We should demand it urgently, irresistibly. If establishment figures want to retain their honours, let them defend their record at public truth and reconciliation hearings.
Let them know we reject feel their self-congratulation. These honours were not won, they were robbed from other people’s dignity and life-chances. Away with them! I am sure a large majority of British people will share the disgust I feel for their self-celebration of dreadful failure, and the anger is felt across party lines.
Publicly stripping them of honours is the only way that we can get the message across in a political system dominated by two self-serving parties. It would be the start of the political change we so urgently need, but cannot attain via Labour or the Conservatives.
For who in their right minds believes those who have run and regulated the water industry deserve honours? What civic prize would you give to the people who have managed Britain’s transport system? Does Sir Andrew Bailey deserve to keep his knighthood, now we know how under his regulatory aegis, the pensions industry planted LDI timebombs under the economy. Do we think his performance at the Bank of England deserves honouring? The Treasury (remembering the £200bn blunder they’ve landed us with)? The NHS is a national disgrace, so why does its former CEO sit in the Lords? Scotland has degenerated into a mini narco-state, but its chief policeman has been knighted. Generations of politicians and civil service have yet to explain why a schoolchild in England’s Berwick should be worth so much less than a child a mile north of the border. Should their silence be rewarded or excoriated?
I could go on indefinitely. If you bring in a major infrastructure project late and way over budget, should you expect to pick up a gong at the end of it? If you as a politician or civil servant OK’d the phony budget and timetable, what do you deserve from us - public honour or public scorn?
It’s hard to keep up with the newsflow. This article was largely penned before we learned that head of the Met Sir Mark Rowley is defending his £200,000 pa HR boss Clare Davies OBE despite an investigation by Baroness Louise Casey finding problems in the Met’s planning, recruitment, training, supervision and misconduct. Well, I think we already knew the Met has an HR problem when it turned out it had given a gun to a serial rapist who’d racked up multiple complaints, and that the organization was riddled with misogyny, racism and homophobia.
What can be done? Politics offers no answers because the two major parties have colluded in this wreckage, and the first-past-the-post barnacles them to privilege regardless. The wider establishment in the civil service, the media, academia and the judiciary have colluded in this wreckage. There’s no reason to believe they know the damage done, or care a jot about it. What can be done?
Britain doesn’t do revolutions.
Step outside the Southeast and you’ll find regions in Britain that were blighted 40 years ago, and have simply been left to rot. For 40 years! Forty years - it’s enough!
I was talking to my sister, who lives near Holmfirth, a small town in West Yorkshire which the Times recently lauded as one of the best Britain. Maybe, but the shops are now opening only four days a week, and the pubs are closing early because it doesn’t pay to stay open. She went to get some cash, but found herself for the first time using Barclays because the Lloyds branch had closed. I hope she enjoyed the Barclays experience because she’ll not have that opportunity for long - Barclays have just announced they’re closing their Holmfirth branch. One of the ‘best towns in Britain’ is dying before her eyes.
Now I’m done with waiting. I want justice, I want punishment for to an establishment which has been so content to let so much of the country rot for so long. I want popular scorn to burn away the seemingly indestructible carapace of their self-regard. I want them humbled.
I think a lot of people feel the same way.
Britain doesn’t do revolutions. But it does effect revolutionary change, quite often.
When the right wind blows, British people can achieve unthinkable political results remarkably quickly, despite all establishment obstruction. I am reading ‘Bury the Chains’, an account of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade. We forget just what a remarkable achievement it was, and how quickly won. When the Abolition Society was founded in 1787, slavery was not an issue in Britain. Slavery had been universally practiced throughout all of human history, so what’s the fuss? This assumption was shared by all represented in Parliament, and Britain’s public finances, its fine 18th century architecture, and large swathes of its economy, were balanced on the ‘triangle trade’ between Britain, Western Africa and the Americas.
But within no more than a couple of years of the Abolition Society’s foundation, the slave trade public feeling was so aroused and so vocal that it was suddenly on everyone’s agenda, in parliament, in the press, in the judiciary, in the worlds of words and fashion. Even in a system which was only partly democratic, change became irresistible.
What the Abolition Society achieved, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville was ‘absolutely without precedent . . . If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary. ‘ For the Abolition Society essentially invented all the techniques that successful pressure groups have used since then. As Adam Hochschild: In all of human experience, there was no precedent for such a campaign.’ We can learn anew from them.
How as it done? What was started first by Quakers, then blazed into life by the efforts of a hyperactive Cambridge classics firebrand Thomas Clarkson, and carried into court by a dauntless self-taught lawyer Granville Sharp. But arguably, the moment abolition went from being a passionate minority concern to something quite different came in 1788, was when 10,000 Mancunians - approximately one in five of the city’s population - signed a petition demanding the abolition of the slave trade. Manchester, which had pitiful political representation, and a huge economic stake in the triangle trade, tipped the balance. Neighbouring cities were keen to join their voices in the campaign, so civic petitions multiplied. It was game on: the debate went public, and for the first time, women found their voices on public platforms; Josiah Wedgewood fashioned an Abolition medallion that became a must-have signifier, etc etc.
Finally the campaign brought a dazzlingly brilliant young MP on board - William Wilberforce. Even then, he needed a slight nudge, and it came from William Pitt (the younger) who, sensing the shift in tectonic plates, encouraged him to get involved: ‘Do not lose time, or the ground may be occupied by another’.
Imagine if Sir Keir Starmer returned his knighthood, saying: ‘On reflection, I failed the children in Rochdale so I just can’t wear this honour.’
Imagine if Sir Richard Dearlove KCMG, OBE gave up his knighthood, in acknowledgment that he played fast and loose with dodgy intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Imagine Sir Ed Davey giving up his knighthood because. . . why did he get it in the first place? Oh yes, the energy policy which has served Britain so well.
Could the British people be persuaded to demand that our failed establishment hand back their undeserved honours? What would it take? It would take a coordinated campaign, embracing all techniques of public persuasion and, perhaps, a sufficiently large mass of public petitions to parliament, collected and delivered on paper not just screens. It would take people committed in every town and city to get out there and collect signatures. The shoe-leather spent collecting those signatures could perhaps buy the start of a fundamental improvement in the way Britain is governed. Who is up for it? As a start. please. . . .
And finally, when it becomes clear that there is a will for this, the politician to embrace and champion the cause will emerge. At that point, we can start to change Britain for the better.
Something that strikes me about your explanation of how abolitionism spread** is the application of a pre-existing institution (or network of institutions) that helped to spread this idea. Moreover it was an institution that was already imbued with notions of egalitarianism (all equal in the eyes of god) - the non-conformist churches.
A similar thought struck me about the rise of the Labour party. It arose through existing institutions formed for a separate purpose: the unions.
I think there is much to be said for a mass movement to generate some sort of political pressure. But I wonder if, for it to work, we would need to go back a stage and find (or create?) some sort of institutions that provide participants who are open to being persuaded on the merits of pushing the elite actually to bl**dy well listen. Similar to both the non-conformist churches and the unions, would the institution have to be non-party political in order to gain sufficient popularity?
Where are such organisations to be found? It is difficult to know. The British Legion perhaps? The churches are useless but perhaps there are mosques in run down parts of the country that would be interested?
I know it's frustrating to go back by one stage, rather than just hit the ground running but it strikes me as likely that a movement like this needs a spine. What do you think?
** Have you listened to the rest is history's take on Benjamin Lay? Doubtless you know all about him already but you might find it interesting nonetheless.