A committee of MPs has complained that too many honours go to civil servants, politicians and celebrities. One really does wonder why it's taken them until now to realise this.
For decades, perhaps centruries, honours were awarded largely to politicians and others of significant influence. Then it became the norm to reward many civil servants once they reached certain levels - a famous sketch from 'Yes Minister' has Bernard explaining to Jim Hacker the language attached to the awarding of the CMG, KCMG and GCMG, honours exclusively awarded to senior civil servants.
More recently and with the rise of the celebrity culture, honours have been showered like confetti on a host of media and sports' 'stars', to such an extent that many of the gongs are now almost meaningless. Doing good for your community brings an MBE while being a name on television is worthy of a knighthood.
That the system is shot to pieces is obvious to anyone with a brain cell. That it's taken a whole committee of MPs so long to realise this simply raises questions as to how many brain cells they have; the chances are that their brain cells are, anyway, outnumbered by their collective gongs.
No comments:
Post a Comment