We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Fairly secret service Among the rank-upon-rank quangocrats and glorious anomalies of the Queen’s birthday honours, I was struck by an example of the coyness that draws attention to itself:
OBE – William Anderson; Grade B2, Ministry of Defence; London.
No citation. No location. All other London awards carry the postal out-code (e.g. “SW1A”, “W8”) of the recipient or their office. Grade B2 is a junior executive grade, and one usually only gets an honour for being head of something, even in the civil service. This all stands out as odd.
So why do it? If Mr Anderson’s work is too secret to mention, then it seems just a tad silly to go to great lengths not to mention it in this ostentatious way. It would have been easy to invent something boring that insiders would know to be a cover story (most fellow OBEs are getting the award for work in organisations no-one outside them will have heard of before). Or the honour itself could have been made secretly.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
What is the point of a secret honour?
Isn’t the whole point of a knighthood, OBE etc to flaunt it wherever possible to get good tables in restaurants, push in queues, get off parking fines etc?
Without such privileges, the whole thing smacks of a bit of a waste of time.
But the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is that everybody knows about it…
Why did you keep it secret Demietri??
Well of course there is no point to secret honours.
He must have done something pretty special though, given his lowly rank.
Ah, it just occured to me, everybody knows the post code of MI6. As you say- Very Odd!!
An OBE is a “Cornflakes” Medal. You get one after 20+ years of government service – even if all you’ve done is breathe. It is no good for getting tables in restaurants or anything else.
As you say, generally you only get an honour for being head of something, not one of the rank and file. Or else for being an opportunity for the government mix with the glitterati or to buff its egalitarian iself-mage.
This being so different from the run-of-the-mill nonsense that is the honours system, I can’t help wondering if maybe this gentleman did something extraordinary, perhaps something for which we all have cause to be grateful. Something, perhaps, worthy of being honoured.
I suppose we’ll never know.
If you do a search for the word “grade” in the last few honours lists, you’ll see that this sort of thing is quite common.
The Ministry of Defence usually is quite coy about what its people do, even where there isn’t any obvious need, partly from the pervasive culture of security, partly because there are many jobs there that people aren’t quite comfortable acknowledging publicly. Something like quality control inspector for cluster bombs is probably as worthy a job as any government service, but can be a social encumbrance at the average liberal dinner party.
Talking about some and not others is, as you point out, a dead giveaway, and cover stories can have holes poked in them, so they take the easy and obvious way out and don’t publicise any of them.
In Civil Service terms, an OBE is a lower-to-middle ranking gong, about right for his rank. Honours for Civil Servants are pretty much “rations”, put in the time and get the rank and the gong is more or less automatic. The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is the most junior of the orders of chivalry; Civil Servants consider it somewhat plebeian.
If our chap advances higher, he’ll get gongs in the order appropriate for his ministry, which is the civil division of the Bath for the MoD. The Bath is the third (technically the fourth) highest order of chivalry, after the Garter, Thistle and the defunct St. Patrick. Next up for him is the CB, Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, then the KCB and if he gets to Permanent Secretary rank, the GCB.
Didn’t Paul Collingwood get an OBE for his contribution to the Ashes 2005 win – where he played one test, got about 10 and 7 in a rain-affected, drawn match.
Has there been a softer OBE in history?
If you do a search for the word “grade” in the last few honours lists, you’ll see that this sort of thing is quite common.
Indeed. I picked on Mr Anderson because he was the first.
I’m a bit more horrified by the idea of someone having a “grade” than by most of the things they might do in it.
Wasn’t it Napoleon who said that he could get men to kill themselves for little pieces of coloured ribbon. Medals are what they give you because they’re too tight to give you money.
In the 18th Century people who did the Government a favour were given a ‘pension,’ i.e. a bung. In due course the Government discovered that it was cheaper to give people ‘honours,’ i.e. an ego-wank. Then they discovered that they could get people to give the Government money for honours, i.e. a bung; and so was the circle squared.