A matter of honour

As yet another round of honours is published to mark the Queen’s official birthday, Professor Mike Oliver poses questions of patronage and relevance and argues that those who accept honours betray disabled people’s cause

Over the years I have been amazed by the number of politically active disabled people who have accepted honours based upon royal patronage. Many have then justified their decisions by claiming that they accepted the award not just for themselves but for other disabled people as well.

Now, as far as I know, disabled people have never even debated the merits or otherwise of the honours system and certainly have never given disability activists permission to accept awards on our behalf.

In my view the honours system is a corruption of the democratic principles on which government is supposed to be based. To accept an honour means accepting the legitimacy of royal patronage. It means accepting that there are dozens of people who by accident of birth alone are entitled to the kinds of care packages that even the most severely disabled people can only dream about: free accommodation, dressers, butlers, cooks, shoppers, cleaners, gardeners and security staff as well as free transport in helicopters, planes, trains, boats and cars though never on the buses. And in order to get this fantastic care package there is no personally intrusive assessment to decide whether their needs are substantial or critical nor any financial assessment to decide how much of it they must pay for themselves. Nor are any of these care packages now at risk.

The history of the system is intertwined with the history of the British Empire. For many of the indigenous peoples of the empire their experiences of this history were of exploitation and oppression. These experiences are not dissimilar to those experienced by disabled people over the last two centuries and to accept an honour based upon them is to accept these experiences as legitimate in others while continuing to advocate against them for ourselves.

Honours are also relevant to our own history. We know that many of the big charities who were supposed to represent our interests to government were more concerned to ensure their prominent members and staff received their honours than to accurately articulate our views.

In an era of supposedly open government, there are no published criteria for application, no formal application procedure, no open decision making process and no accountability for the decisions made. Thus when we accept an honour we are accepting that government has a right to make decisions about our lives behind closed doors. Once we accept that in one aspect of our life it automatically becomes harder to challenge it in others.

The current Government has created more fear and anxiety amongst disabled people than I can ever remember before. If those who have accepted honours on our behalf really want to do something for us, then they could return them.

It would be more than an empty gesture and would make a political statement that couldn’t be ignored.