Sometime around 2019, like many who receive this kind of thing, the most unexpected email from the Cabinet Office dropped into my inbox. The sort, in my usual rush, I at first ignored, then read, re-read, assuming some kind of error.
As it sunk in and I tried to figure out who had put me forward, also like many, I wrestled with what it meant. I turned it down.
Before giving my personal reasons, I want to turn to the great poet, Lemn Sissay OBE, and why he accepted his OBE. No-one puts it better than Lemn (well, maybe Benjamin Zephaniah on refusing his). Lemn, a poet, who grew up in care, given an Anglo-Saxon name that hid his own, accepted his OBE for his younger self. Because his younger self, in an out of institutions, in care, running the streets, wouldn’t have believed it. And because it might encourage young people who have experienced care to reach for the stars. Who can possibly argue with that?
But I’m not a Black British poet, denied my heritage and grown up in care. I’m the daughter of a white man born in 1938 in South Norfolk who was educated to rule the empire (albeit he rebelled too and became a secondary school English teacher with a penchant for opera).
My whole working life I’ve worked with those with less privilege than me. Whilst I don’t have all the solutions to inequality, the hierarchies of state including the honours system, form the bedrock of the inequalities the people I have worked with, face.
Be it the House of Lords, the inherited wealth that purports to be achieved thanks to superiority and entrepreneurialism, land ownership in the hands of few and their rentierism, the number of MPs who continue to be from privileged backgrounds (private school, university educated, political classes) or the oligarchs and hereditary peers running our press, big businesses and think tanks – the power they hold whilst depending on keeping the poor poor, is unconscionable.
Unlike wealth, the inequality they depend on trickles down into our communities. It’s a Ponzi scheme of hierarchy and subservience.
A BEM puts you on a different rung – climbing up that hierarchy.
In honouring privileged people like me, the same logic enables the right-wing press to blame those that rely on the state for support and a safety net. The privilege that enables me to work hard becomes a narrative of blame and shame for those that supposedly don’t. This lie maintains a much needed gulf that power relies on to keep people stuck where they are.
My champagne socialist father, as all fathers capable of good, respected my decision. The man of 1938 rather liked the idea of me having a BEM, (albeit I’m a girl), but the man of 2019, found himself respecting my views and secretly rather proud of my decision (he could both show off that I’d been offered and refused it, depending on his audience). Others thought me short-sighted and principled to a fault, believing that the profile might have helped my social enterprise and career.
It might have leveraged some connections and who knows, they might have led to some more funding and maybe helping some more people. That’s a lot of maybes and rooms I’d have struggled to feel comfortable in.
My younger self was shocked at the dawning realisation that many in the third sector don’t actually want equality at all. They want to help, they want to ameliorate suffering and some might even think people deserve better.
I want change. And change doesn’t come by subscribing to the honours system.
PS. I want to thank the anonymous person that nominated me. They did so in good faith.