Centre For Small State Conservatives

Arise Sir Idris Elba, Sir Christopher Dean and Dame Jayne Torvill. This year’s New Year Honours list had a host of well-deserved gongs for famous and not-so-famous names, alongside the usual criticisms about back-scratching cronyism too.   

Whatever the rights and wrongs of last week’s list, the idea of getting a gong or a title feels laughably unlikely for most of us. We assume they’re either inherited by people who are extremely posh, and who are descended from and probably married to other, equally-posh folk. Or perhaps that new ones are handed out by a magic circle of people who all know each other already, to other people who are part of the same gang. It’s a closed world. The last, most deeply-entrenched establishment crony club of all.

There’s more than a grain of truth in this ‘Britain’s-still-Downton-Abbey-really’ caricature too. Hundreds of families still inherit titles and, even though nominations for new honours are a bit more open and objective than they used to be, no one really knows why one person was given an MBE when another person wasn’t, or why someone else got an OBE instead of a knighthood either. It’s as murky and old-fashioned as a London pea-soup fog.

This can’t be right. Modern Britain should be an open, meritocratic society, where what matters is where you’re going, not where you’re from. Where people do well because of their talent, ability and hard work, not because of who they know, or who their parents are.

If our honours system doesn’t work that way, it will just reinforce old caricatures of Britain as an unfair, immobile and unjust society where impenetrable glass ceilings and narrow gates allow a gilded, out-of-touch elite to carry on looking after its own by handing out titles to cronies with the right connections, rather than to honest, hardworking people who’ve genuinely earned their success.

The answer is a reformed honours system that systematically and fairly recognises the country’s best and brightest people using simple, public criteria that we can all see and understand. If we can create a points-based immigration system, using clear criteria to choose and admit the world’s top talents when they want to come and work in the UK, why can’t we do it for our own people at home too? It would make British honours and titles into the fairest, most transparent, most meritocratic way of recognising and celebrating achievement in the modern world.

The practical result would be an annual UK Talent List, like the UK Rich List, which would be published each year. The top teachers, for example, might be the ones who had successfully run Britain’s largest or most-improved schools for the longest time. The top businesspeople could be those who had either run the largest or fastest-growing companies for many years, or the entrepreneurs who had created the most wealth from scratch. We’d develop equivalent ways to score Britain’s top charity workers, philanthropists, police officers and anyone else who was eligible too.

Once the new and fairer scoring system was in place and the UK Talent List was public, the top few names in each area would become lords and ladies. The slightly-larger next group below them would become knights and dames. The still-larger group below them would get OBEs, CBEs or MBEs. Everyone would be able to see each person’s score, so we’d all know why each person deserved their new title or honour, and that the system was fair. The Downton Abbey caricature would be laid to rest.

Equally importantly, anyone who thought they, their boss or their Mum deserved an honour or a title would be able to work out what they’d score and what they’d get if they applied. The successful Northern businessman or woman who doesn’t know many people in Westminster could check if they’d done enough to be recognised and, if they didn’t quite have enough points yet, what else they’d need to achieve to qualify next year.

Any exceptions? Well yes, but only a very few. Awards for bravery or valour probably can’t and shouldn’t be boiled down to a points-based system, so they wouldn’t change. Nor the tiny number that are the personal gift of the Monarch. And people being appointed to the Upper House of Parliament would need a different title than ‘My Lord’ or ‘My Lady’ in future; perhaps ‘Senator’ or even ‘Alderman’; so we could disentangle recognition for a lifetime’s talent and achievement from constitutional questions of who should make our laws.

But that’s it, and the effect on British ambition and aspiration would be electric. Previously-closed doors to a cosily-privileged club would be blown wide open. No one could credibly claim any longer that the system was unfairly stacked against them. It wouldn’t matter who you knew, or where you went to school. The UK would be the place where the best and brightest are recognised and celebrated for their talent, ability and hard work. The planet’s most talented people, in every walk of life, would beat a path to our door, because modern Britain would be the country where anyone and everyone could join our aristocracy of talent.

If you like this idea, you’ll find more details, soundbites and rebuttals about it under An Aristocracy of Talent in the Policy Thumbnail section of our website

This article is the latest in a fortnightly series of policy proposals published in CapX from John Penrose and the Centre for Small State Conservatives.