08.01.2004

Away with gongs and titles

The British honours system is more than a laughable anachronism: it sheds light on the nature of our society and the royalist traditions that underpin it. Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group believes that the recent spate of honours refuseniks heralds the birth of a republican socialist party

A strange but familiar ritual took place recently in the Australian outback. Broadcaster Tony Robinson, well known to Blackadder fans as 'Baldrick', knelt in the sand. He was duly dubbed "Sir Tony" with an appropriately sized twig in the hands of King Michael of England. It was a truly 'egalitarian' moment in which any citizen could become a knight merely for the asking. So who is King Michael I?

Documents recently uncovered by Dr Mike Jones in Rouen cathedral prove that Edward IV, born in 1442, was not a legitimate heir to the throne. His mother had a fling with an English archer, while his royal 'father', the Duke of York was away on a long military campaign. According to de Brets, the authority on matters of royal lineage, a real monarch must be from the royal blood line and born in wedlock. Edward was therefore a bastard-pretender. A popular rumour concerning this at the time is referred to in Shakespeare's play about Richard III and is now confirmed by the new evidence.

The implications go right down the family tree. It means that Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, and all subsequent monarchs, no longer have a legitimate claim to the throne. The royal blood line descends from Edward IV's brother, George. Following this Plantagenet line would have given us a Margaret I, and for example a Henry X and until recently a Barbara I.

So it has come to pass that the legitimate, if uncrowned, king of England is currently Michael Hastings-Plantagenet. Tony Robinson found King Michael alive and well and living like an ordinary Aussie bloke with his family in New South Wales. King Michael loves Australia so much that he voted for a republic in their referendum! None of this matters very much to republicans. It is not the person of the monarch, but the institution of the crown and all the political, bureaucratic and military powers expropriated by the ruling class in its name. Communists are militant republicans who seek to eradicate all forms of monarchism as part of the struggle to democratise the institutions of state.

We must not lose sight of this when looking at the distribution of royal titles and awards. As usual, the new year's honours list sparked some discussion in the capitalist press about the merits of royal honours. The controversy was fuelled by the refusal of Benjamin Zephaniah to accept an empire medal and the claim that Prince Charles had intervened to prevent professor Colin Blakemore, head of the Medical Research Council, from getting his knighthood.

In contrast to King Michael's simple ceremony, Britain has a highly secretive honours system in which "Mrs Queen", as a poetic Benjamin Zephaniah named her, hands out the social rankings of lords pompous and knights farcical. Nevertheless the honours fiasco is worth more than a cursory glance, because it illustrates important aspects of our political culture and system of government. We might begin our criticism by asking whether we need any kind of honours system at all.

As communists, I do not think we should be opposed in principle to the symbolic recognition of social merit. The CPGB itself gives recognition each year to the comrades with the best record of selfless devotion to fundraising, during the annual summer offensive. I see no reason why a socialist society might not give recognition to citizens who have saved lives or have made some outstanding contribution to the welfare of the community. Such awards would of necessity be decided by working class people in an open, democratic process. Perhaps, in the transition to a classless communist society, symbolic recognition of the best examples of voluntary labour will become more important, as money and paid labour progressively disappear.

Having said that, I do not necessarily believe that socialism needs a system of social recognition, but I would not rule it out.

In a capitalist society an honours system has a different role. It is primarily to reward and give recognition to the achievements of the rich and powerful, who have served the state or made the greatest contribution to profit-making. Giving awards to dinner ladies and road sweepers provides a spurious egalitarian cover story.

Today the nouveaux riches like David Beckham or Mick Jagger, who have made millions from professional sport or the global music business, are added to the top civil servants and trade union leaders, whose contribution to capitalist profits may have been selling off state assets or selling out their members' wages and conditions.Every socialist feels a natural loathing for such a system.

Lloyd George, liberal prime minister in the early part of the last century, adopted the method of selling honours to the highest bidder. Letting market forces decide who gets what is surely the most appropriate way for capitalism to hand out the plaudits. Those with the most money should naturally outbid everybody else and accumulate many more honours to go with their piles of cash. Workers would get nothing, but that would be a fair representation of their position in capitalist society. We would certainly have had a Lord Murdoch of Wapping by now if market principles had prevailed.

But Lloyd George ruined the emerging market for honours by siphoning off the revenues to finance his political campaigns. Selling honours was seen as another example of the kind of corruption and cronyism that has been central to the distribution of honours since the days of Charles I.

The United States has what might be called a republican-capitalist honours system. There is a very limited range of awards, such as the Congressional Medal of Honour. A few weeks ago president Bush gave Lord George Robertson the US Presidential Medal because of his work for Nato, serving the interests of US imperialism. However, the US republican-capitalist honours system rejects anything that seems to confer social status on its holder. Some medals may be handed out, but there is only one class of citizen. The constitution declares that "no title of nobility shall be granted by the United States".

The United Kingdom has a royal-capitalist honours system. It recognises and rewards the achievements of the rich and powerful in business and the state. Yet the British system combines this with peculiar features of royal-feudalism. Its origins are in the honours feudal monarchs bestowed on their courtiers and ministers. Its gongs, sashes and titles are ancient, or archaic. Its lordships, knighthoods and royal garters now seem comically Ruritanian. The various hierarchical orders of the British empire (OBE, MBE and CBE) are outdated and offensive in a multi-racial society. The whole thing is a national embarrassment, because it reminds us of a certain truth about the kind of society we are and of our collective failure to change it. The honours system is a mirror of the class system.

The British class system is bound up with royal culture and its absurd hierarchy of hereditary privilege, snobbery, sycophancy and deference. Anybody who receives an honour or medal in the UK must be prepared to bow or curtsy before a billionairess because of her (bogus) blood line.

The royal honours system both reflects and reinforces the British class hierarchy. Working class people brought up in this society have been imbued with a monarchist culture. Many still have a sense that someone who is a lord or a duke is in some way special. Many automatically feel a certain deference in their presence. The language and accent used by the upper classes reinforce those deeper feelings of social superiority and class inferiority, which continues to disable some of the most intelligent and productive people in our society. The honours system tells us more about our society than simply its peculiar royalist class culture. The way awards are handed out tells us a great deal about how the British system of government actually works.

There is nothing democratic in the distribution of honours and everything that is bureaucratic and secretive. Channels Four's investigation into the 'Secrets of the honours system' makes this clear (see Jon Snow The Independent on Sunday December 28). The system is so secretive that it is impossible to check the claims that Prince Charles had intervened to block the professor's knighthood. Certainly Charles Windsor and Mrs Queen have a direct line to the prime minister. But exactly who said what to whom is a closely guarded state secret. Snow and his team were never able to talk to anybody in the process, and could only gather their evidence from those who had some link in the past. Like much of the constitutional monarchist state, the honours system is shrouded in a blanket of secrecy.

Certainly the Whitehall mandarins have a central role in the distribution of awards. The honours-bureaucracy operates from its offices in Monck Street in central London. Civil servants sift through the submissions from her majesty's humble subjects, whilst giving due weight and attention to the politically motivated proposals from the prime minister, monarchy and other senior civil servants. Blair exercises considerable patronage over the process by adding or subtracting from the list.

This year he handed out 20 peerages to his Labour Party cronies. Iain Duncan Smith, as Tory leader, also had the right to put forward recommendations and this year provided the names of a number of prominent donors to the Tory Party. Not surprisingly, as Jon Snow confirms, civil servants are themselves the main beneficiaries of the system.

In the 2002 list they collected five times as many awards as, for example, teachers, whilst businessmen are three times as likely to be recipients than the police. Twenty-four arms traders were honoured, no doubt for their success in selling weapons round the world. The honours process therefore mirrors the real distribution of power within the state, in which the Whitehall mandarins, the prime minister and the monarchy all have their say. The secrecy surrounding this process excludes any effective scrutiny by MPs in parliament or by the people. This mirrors the concentration of power in the state and the effective sidelining of parliament by the 'elected dictatorship' - whether handing out honours or making decisions about going to war in Iraq.

Since the 1980s the post-war Elizabethan welfare state has been progressively dismantled, evolving into a crisis-prone, degenerate social monarchy. The royal honours system is following the same path.

Like the social monarchy as a whole, the honours system is discredited and in crisis. Jon Snow says that, "unless a more egalitarian, streamlined system is introduced, 'Sir', 'Dame', 'Commander' and the rest will fast complete their journey into ridicule" (The Independent on Sunday December 28). He is not alone in this view.

Editorials in the capitalist press are calling for reform. The editorial in The Independent says that "our current arrangement for honours grew out of an age of deference - that will no longer do. Honours should be bestowed on behalf of the nation as a whole rather than by individuals, no matter how exalted their social standing" (December 31).

Another aspect of this crisis is a growing list of republican or semi-republican refuseniks. Such people include JG Ballard, Nigella Lawson, Michael Frayn, Dawn French, Benjamin Zephaniah and Jon Snow himself. The more the monarchy is questioned and the corrupt honours system exposed, the more shameful it will become to accept an award and the more honourable to decline one. Benjamin Zephaniah's recent refusal did not make him a social pariah, but on the contrary made him a hero. When author JG Ballard was asked why he had refused, he explained that "as a republican, I can't accept an honour awarded by a monarch - all that bowing and scraping. The whole system of hereditary privileged and rank should be swept away" (The Independent on Sunday December 28).

The real politics of accepting honours was summed up by Penny Junor, Prince Charles's biographer. When asked what her position was, she explained she would accept an honour because "I believe in the monarchy and I think it's disrespectful if you refuse." Zephaniah caused a stir before Christmas when he refused an OBE. Usually those who would refuse such honours are weeded out before they get the chance to turn it down. Zephaniah cited "the empire, the monarchy, the government, the war in Iraq" as reasons for his refusal to accept. When he was interviewed on the BBC's Newsnight he told viewers of the support and congratulations he received from ordinary people on the streets.

New Labour is now searching for a modernised 'people's monarchy' and 'people's honours system'. The calls for a radical overhaul will come to nought. John Major promised to reform the system to make in more egalitarian in the face of growing political embarrassment. The system is thoroughly conservative and resistant to change, except of the most cosmetic kind. Real change requires a movement from below, a popular democratic revolution led by the working class.

Meanwhile Blair will produce another cosmetic exercise. Sir Hayden Phillips, the permanent secretary at the department of constitutional affairs, has been asked to make proposals. The top civil servants remain in charge of organising the system from which they are the principal beneficiaries. It will be a classic fudge, designed to fool the public, whilst maintain the status quo in all essentials. About a third of the country are soft republicans, who think we do not have an effective democracy. About the same proportion thinks the honours system stinks. That many again, showing their mistrust for our ruling class, think it at least conceivable that Diana Spencer was murdered by the dark forces of the state.

There is surely a political party in there somewhere waiting to be born - a party which would put forward a serious republican policy for the abolition of the monarchy, and along with it the archaic royal honours system and all royal titles, lordships and knighthoods. Let us see if Respect has the courage to grasp the democratic nettle, which the liberal republicans who dominate the Marxist movement and the Socialist Workers Party have so far failed to do. We will soon see whether 'R' is for republicanism or for giving 'Respect' to the politics of the SWP.