How should our society reward those who serve it well? In times past, it was simple. The monarch, not just a symbol of society but then its embodiment, proffered wealth, land and title. In these halcyon days of democracy, neither the Queen nor the prime minister can give chums and lackeys pots of gold and tracts of Lincolnshire, but some things stay the same: on our behalf, they still distribute preferment in the form of honours.
It is truly an anachronism and by tinkering with its flaws, those who control the system yearly seek to make it more reflective of a modern age. But they delude themselves, for even on its own terms as a rough and ready mechanism for giving all sections of society the chance to be recognised for outstanding service and contribution, the system does not work.
We hand out about 2,000 honours each year in the Queen’s birthday honours list and the new year honours list. But there’s an issue those who administer the process are loth to recognise.
This system of societal reward carries on against the backdrop of a never-ending drumbeat of appeals, indeed an insistence, that Britons from minority backgrounds should play a full and constructive role in making this a fair and equal society. But it is a system that speaks not of Britain today or even the Britain of this century, but of Britain and its long-passed empire. It offers honours in our name, such as Order of the British Empire, that many deserving people – artists, musicians, doctors, professors, sports stars, activists, politicians – cannot in good conscience accept.
For many minorities, the empire is much more than a historical footnote. Its enduring symbols and psychological legacies remain a live issue and an open wound. To accept this type of preferment is to attach them inextricably to a thing that they despise; to forge a link with Britain’s past that would, to many they respect or might wish to represent, be unacceptable. Is that desirable or right? Having spent time speaking to minority Britons who have been obliged to confront this dilemma, I don’t think it is.
I don’t want to overstate the case. Minority Britain is not a monolith. Some nominated minority Britons go happily to Buckingham Palace, unencumbered by qualms or the baggage of empire. I asked Samir Shah, the celebrated TV executive and former chair of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, how long it took him to accept his OBE in 2000 (upgraded this year to a CBE). “A nanosecond,” he told me.
But others have refused outright. Think of the writer Benjamin Zephaniah, who roundly and very publicly rejected an OBE in 2003. “I thought that it wasn’t just good enough for me to just say no and just leave it quietly,” he told me. “I think I had to make a big statement to people generally, but especially to people in my community, to say, look, we don’t have to do this.”
Then there’s Howard Gayle, the first black footballer to break through into the Liverpool team in the 1980s and now a tireless community worker. He told me his decision to turn down an MBE for his work with the anti-racism group Kick It Out was a no-brainer. “We’ve got a long history in colonialism and slavery and we’ve never, ever been thought of as a culture deserving of an apology for what was done to us and to our ancestors.”
Both men made a choice and happily live with it. But I say they shouldn’t have had to make it. Both accept honours from within their own communities. It’s the mainstream honours, wider society’s mode of recognition, they have a specific problem with.
For some, the decision can be agonising. Should they accept an honour they may want and feel they deserve, knowing that to do so leaves them open to sometimes very public and always very hurtful censure and hostility? The broadcaster and community activist Dotun Adebayo, who was appointed MBE in 2009 for services to the arts, told me of receiving his offer in the post. He handed the letter to his mother-in-law. “I was thinking this is an issue now. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to accept this. So I wasn’t jumping for joy,” Adebayo said. In the end, he took the medal from the Princess Royal. Last year, conflicted again as the Windrush scandal played out, with all its resonance of betrayal and bad faith, he sought advice from readers of the black newspaper the Voice as to whether he should send it back.
The author and columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown took an MBE in 2001, but “shamed”, as she puts it, by a TV appearance opposite Zephaniah in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, she packaged it up and sent it back. Tragi-comically, she was unsure who to return it to. “It stuck in my throat,” she told me. “Anybody who knows anything knows that that history will never be over in the United Kingdom. It’s in the blood and we’ve seen it all rise up again after Brexit. For all sorts of reasons, I should never have taken it.”
Last month, Simon Woolley, the co-founder and director of Operation Black Vote and chair of the government’s race equality audit panel, became Sir Simon Woolley. He had been tipped off that an offer might come and spent two months wrestling with it. “It was awful,” he told me. “There were two voices. One said to me, ‘Please, you must accept.’ The other asked, ‘What am I accepting?’ I sat down during those two months and, whichever way I dressed it up, I couldn’t see anything positive about the empire.” He discerned positives in the recognition of Operation Black Vote and opportunities for his future equalities work. His research established his knighthood was a medieval title and empire was not mentioned in the announcement or citation. That was a relief. But should people – of low or high station, famous or unknown – have to agonise in this way?
Fifteen years ago, when a select committee reviewed our honours system, it said the OBE, shorn of empire, should become the Order of British Excellence, because “the current nomenclature of honours makes it difficult for some potential recipients to accept them”. MPs didn’t think they were asking for a great deal, but it was too much for traditionalists.
The empire has gone but we cling to its traces. Just recently, hard Brexit types have been dreaming of a Commonwealth association that might be seen as Empire 2.0. If ultra-conservatives truly insist on the right to maintain an empire link to public reward, couldn’t we at least offer conscientious objectors a parallel societal recognition they can easily accept? MPs new to the House of Commons are allowed to swear or affirm, with neither approach deemed inferior nor superior. So are witnesses in British courts, a tradition stretching back to the 17th century, when it was feared criminals were going free because Quakers would not swear on the Bible in court. Why not extend the same concept of reasonable accommodation to our honours?
The receipt of honours should be a celebratory moment. For most people, it is. But there’s an empire problem: it’s well known, long established and easily remedied. A system that makes it morally difficult for deserving people to accept society’s gratitude is not fit for purpose.
The Empire Strikes Black is on Radio 4 at 8pm on Monday
• Hugh Muir is a senior assistant G1 editor
