HERE is my reaction to the publication of the 2019 New Year’s honours list and my personal views on the honours system.

At a time when there is a severe national housing crisis (with house prices spiralling far beyond the reach of the younger generation); millions of people in this country are homeless, dependent on food banks and/or on universal credit; and local authorities’ budgets are under unprecedented pressure (127 public libraries were closed in 2018), we have once again had to put up with the media prattling about meaningless titles handed out to hundreds of pitifully grateful recipients by a 92-year old woman who was mollycoddled from birth and has spent her adult life being waited on hand and foot while enjoying an incomparably opulent life-style.

She has had the best of everything on the face of the earth: none other than Queen Elizabeth II of England & Wales/Queen Elizabeth I of Northern Ireland & Scotland, the unelected, unaccountable, publicly financed British head of state.

She and her family are also the beneficiaries of the most generous public housing assistance scheme in the country, with four palatial residences at their disposal, each comprising 100+ rooms and featuring a large retinue of servants, 24-hr bodyguards, and a fleet of luxury limousines.

Why on earth should the likes of Twiggy, Michael Palin and Pink Floyd be awarded any kind of honour?

They have enjoyed more recognition and accumulated more worldly goods than most of the rest of the population could ever dream of.

Why on earth should a woman with few if any achievements to her name and who owes her majestic position merely to an accident of birth be allowed to graciously bestow ‘marks of distinction’ upon her ‘inferior subjects’?

While the honours system has excited some adverse comment in the media over the past decade or so, and a number of famous people have refused or returned honours, no radical reform along the lines suggested to the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee by Republic in 2004 has ever been attempted.

And so the now largely uncontested honours system, with its precise hierarchy of awards and its whiff of imperial nostalgia, continues to reflect the backward-looking mindset of a country that lacks the dynamism to undertake the constitutional, political and social reform so urgently needed if it is to come to terms with the 21st century and avoid becoming a mere bit player on a world stage dominated by three main protagonists: China, the EU, and the USA.

Cyril Meadows

Leigh