Broken Honours System

 The present scandal concerning the Post Office has highlighted many injustices in the UK.

Basically, a Fujitsu computer system named Horizon was installed into the majority of the post offices in the UK to deal with the accounts and before long many postmasters were being charged with theft and some were jailed. This went on for many years. Eventually one postmaster - namely Alan Bates - led a group of postmasters to challenge the company arguing that there was a glitch in the software that had been installed and that was causing all the problems. The Post Office, who had known about the glitch for many years, continued to insist that there wasn't a problem with the software. There have now been calls for Alan Bates to be knighted.

Please don't accept it, Mr Bates. Just say no. When members of the honours committee come knocking with a knighthood... tell them - with the requisite courtesy - to shove it. For it is the honours system, and the wider cancer of patronage and privilege that provides the essential backdrop to this very British scandal...

Scandal
Edgar Bundy (1862-1922)
Photo Credit: Grundy Art Gallery  [CC BY-NC-SA ]

Isn't this scandal what happens when you have one set of rules for insiders - the ministers, the quangocracy, the executives of giant corporations - and a different set of rules for those who are euphemistically called "ordinary people"?

Look at Lee Castleton... who found himself falsely accused of having his hand in the till, didn't have the cash to hire his own barrister and found himself hundreds of thousands in debt, leaving his family traumatised. Contrast that with Sir Ed Davey, who ignored desperate pleas to look into the scandal as the responsible minister in 2010-12 and later got a job paying £833 an hour to advise a law firm that was representing - you guessed it - the Post Office. In all, he amassed £275,000.

While hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters are still waiting for their wrongful convictions to be overturned (the government is now moving to deal with this), not a single politician, Fujitsu executive or Post Office manager has been interviewed under caution by the police or been contacted by any other body to hold them to account...

So let me ask, while we're on the subject of honours, what you see when (according to a report in 2021) of the people who have given the governing party more than £100,000 in a single donation since 2010, 19 hold life peerages and 20 have ben knighted? What do you see when 14 have been appointed CBE, eight OBE and three MBE...

I see a system in which opportunities are traded, the gilded few evade culpability and donations grease the wheels... while ordinary people are left to hang. Isn't this the pattern that characterises not just the Post Office scandal but also Grenfell, Windrush, the infected blood nightmare and so on and on...

The longer I live, the more I glimpse the scale of social gerrymandering whereby power is conferred not on the talented and deserving but the well connected. We call it cronyism, but I've always felt that term fails to do justice to the malignancy of the disease...

I firmly believe that it's about time to abolish the honours system, the House of Lords and other areas of public life that have become so wholly discredited. I say this not as a radical leftie but as a small "c" conservative who believes in tradition but who also recognises that successful  nations must always be ready to ditch the institutional baggage weighing them down...

And this brings me back to Mr Bates... I'd simply note that it is people like him - those who truly deserve recognition - whose acceptance of these baubles inadvertently confers legitimacy on a rotten system. It is why I pray he rejects it and - is this too much to hope? - helps to bring the edifice crashing down.

(Matthew Syed, The Sunday Times, 2024)

It is too much to hope, I'm afraid, but it's good to know that another individual has come to recognise the rotten system operating in the UK regarding the House of Lords and the honours system.