HM
The Queen today presented the George Cross, the UK’s
highest award for bravery not in the face of the enemy, to the National Health Service, (for the response to the covid pandemic etc.), surely making the NHS Eisenstein’s ‘mass hero’ of our age. This is the third ‘collective’ award (one not to a real person – living or dead) in the history of this medal, founded by her father in 1940; the other recipients being the island of Malta for the bravery of the populace in what seems to me to have been ‘
in the face of the enemy‘ as being bombed for years by the
Regia Aeronautica and Luftwaffe wasn’t just that, what was it?; and the other was the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was scrapped and given the George Cross as a consolation.
However, one of the Palace bureaucrats celebrating the award is quoted as below:
Lt Col Michael Vernon, comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s office with responsibility for organising ceremonial events, said: “This award recognises all NHS staff, past and present, across all disciplines and all four nations.
So being snarky, that includes perhaps the most prolific individual murderer in British history,
Dr Harold Shipman, a GP fond of polishing off his elderly patients, for free.
And of course, this gushing tribute necessarily covers former nurse and convicted murderer
Beverley Allitt, who also did not charge her victims.
But of course, there have been systemic issues, like the
Mid-Staffordshire Hospital scandal.
But looking at it in the balance, it seems that the NHS deserves its honour, despite being a bureaucratic abstraction, and an
expensive and ineffective one at that. I seem to recall the Army being drafted in during the coronavirus pandemic to (give the impression that the government could) do something about the appalling logistics in the NHS.
And now the token medal is going on tour, a holy relic, as if a modern-day equivalent to the bones of a saint:
NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard paid tribute to those who worked on the front line and said the vaccine programme saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
She told the Queen that the medal will go on a tour of the NHS before a permanent home is found.
Is it heresy to say that honours don’t really exist? That an honour is just a piece of cloth and metal, with a document relating to it? That veneration of medals is simply absurd, it is simply reflective of the opinion of a committee, the absurdity of it made evident here for all to see.
And, if you are to think of honours, not deeds, as somehow noteworthy, let us not forget that the first time that the Queen awarded a George Cross, it was to the widow of
Flight-Lieutenant John Quinton, who gave away his only parachute after a mid-air collision. If you wish to measure the decline of this nation under (but not, I say, due to) Elizabeth II of England, I of Scotland, compare the two awards and all that happened in-between. Can we please stop pretending that the State can make things not what they really are?
“Is it heresy to say that honours don’t really exist?”
Honor will always exist. But these people with their cargo-cult mentality think that the honor lies in the medallion, when actually the medallion merely symbolizes that we hold someone to have done an honorable thing. By giving the medal, they bestow honor. Backwards.
On the positive side, now every employee and ex-employee of the NHS can put “winner of the George Cross” on their resume.
It is a small mercy that Dr Michael Mann was never employed by the nhs or else the George Cross would feature in his bio alongside his Nobel Prize.
@bobby b
Honor will always exist. But these people with their cargo-cult mentality think that the honor lies in the medallion, when actually the medallion merely symbolizes that we hold someone to have done an honorable thing.
In the UK something in the order of 25% of honours, and especially senior honours like knighthoods and senior members of orders like Bath, St. Michael and St. George, and so forth go to civil servants: what we Americans would call the swamp. Honours are HIGHLY political and reflect being part of, or compliant with, the state. Military medals may be an exception, but they are capricious, many great acts of heroism go unrecognized.
Honours in the UK are chosen by a political committee with the exception of a few special very limited cases, like the Order of Merit, The Victorian order and the Knights of the Garter and Thistle. This was not of the Queen’s choosing, it was some political committee, probably with a lot of input from BoJo because it’d look good (and perhaps because he thought it meritorious.)
America was supposed to be different. However, one of the things that bugs me a lot is when politicians get to refer to themselves by their most senior job decades after they left. President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Senator Whoever, Ambassador Whatshisname. These are job titles, not titles of nobility.
One of my favorite pieces of Americana trivia relates to Jefferson. In his famous letter to the Baptists of Danbury who feared the persecution of the Congregationalists of Danbury, he promised a wall of separation between church and state. Sent when he was still President he signed it “Thomas Jefferson Esq.”
Fraser,
Last years appointment of Tony Blair as a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of Chivalry and bestowed at the sole discretion of the Sovereign, was in the words of J B Morton “a right puzzler” and a rare example of HRH being seriously out of step with public opinion.
Being a brilliant man, he considered his status as a lawyer to be more important than being merely the President. Anyone can be elected President. To be a lawyer – that’s American nobility.
😉
I remember thinking that she was a tough old bird who was making a point about what “the Queen’s discretion” meant. No polls for her! I admired her for it, although I might have chosen differently.
Odd, because “Esq.” does not mean someone is a lawyer in the UK
Bobby
Ennobling Nigel Farage would have made a far stronger and infinitely better received point.
I have a few nitpicks on this post. This comment covers the most important issue.
While Niall pedant Kilmartin concedes that
could have added “except those convicted of murdering their patients and other serious crimes”, Niall unwoke Kilmartin thinks that sounds a bit like a typical woke demand against some group they hate – some organisation they will never let be praised without demanding a loud spit-in-the-soup mention of some fault that occurred in its long history.
Very few NHS doctors and nurses murder their patients, just as very few US police gun down unthreatening blacks. So I may retort with this apt example whenever anyone in the UK witters BLM wokeness –
– and the OP makes a great worked example of that, perfect for shoving in the faces of the politically correct, but only AFTER they have exposed themselves with some “How dare you praise [the UK / the army / whatever] without talking about … “. A deadly (to them) response afterwards, it would be more a PC-enabler beforehand. It’s like that subset of left-wing antisemitic statements that do not rise to the level of full-on Jew-hatred in themselves, but deserve to be called the most appalling racism if you apply their own standards.
Of course, PC history is largely fake or spun whereas Shipman and the others undoubtedly happened, but since the long history of Britain contains much that greatly benefits the world and also, to quote James Bond, some incidents that were “not our finest hour”, genuine tu quoque applications can arise.
Fraser,
The irony of civil servants getting gongs is that most of them support the EU, so they are being rewarded for service to the country when they are actively working against it.
Well, it should.
I note that Malta left the Empire soon after its award, and the RUC was disbanded at the time of its award. Is it too much to hope that we will likewise soon be rid of the NHS?
Having nitpicked the post, I will more constructively (I hope) suggest that this award should not have recognised
but something like
That phrasing silently omits Shipman, and also omits those doctors who seized the pandemic-rules-created opportunity to see fewer of those annoying people the patients, those managers who made life difficult for better doctors and nurses through selfishness and through mere incompetence, etc., etc., That phrasing explicitly praises merit, not mere existence.
That would have been an award that I (and Mr Ed too, I daresay) could have heard of with less qualified feelings.
That’s not quite true. At the time Esquire was generally used to indicate someone of gentle birth without any noble titles. It was particularly used by Justices of the Peace, who were often minor gentry. One of my hobbies is researching the local history of my area and I’ve seen several such individuals who, lacking any other title, were given the honorific of Esquire. Queens Counsel are also afforded the honorific Esquire on their letters patent, but obviously the Q.C. title is more prestigious and is used in preference.
So today esquire is used quite informally in the UK, but at the same time is used specifically for Queen’s Counsel and other high offices associated with the legal profession.
@John
Last years appointment of Tony Blair as a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of Chivalry and bestowed at the sole discretion of the Sovereign, was in the words of J B Morton “a right puzzler” and a rare example of HRH being seriously out of step with public opinion.
I think in fairness to HRH, ex Prime Ministers, especially ones that hold the post for a long time, tend to get KG-ed, usually after a considerable period of time presumably to take off the political sensitivity of the appointment. Wilson, Callahan, Thatcher and Major were/are KGs, all of Blairs immediate predecessors.
So if it is a puzzler for Morton, it is only so because he assumes everything is political, when, in fact, when it comes to HRH, it is far more about tradition, “public service” and non partisanship. I’m a Republican (in the British sense), but I think a fair assessment of Elizabeth would say she has been scrupulously apolitical. When the best her critics can do is suggest her trivial and apolitical comment that the people of Scotland “think very carefully” about their vote in the Indy Referendum one has to think she has done a pretty decent job staying out of it.
FWIW, I had a look and nearly every British prime minister before Blair received either the KG or KT, which is the equivalent, given to those of Scottish descent. What I think would be more significant would be were he to be awarded the Order of Merit. This one, along the the Victorian Order (which is for personal service to the Sovereign) is very much more the Queen’s personal choice and is rarely given, even to ex prime ministers. Thatcher I think being the last one to receive it. Which, FWIW, I think tells you a lot about the rumor that the Queen did not care for Thatcher or her policies. I do not remember a big brouhaha about that award, even though it was given when Thatcher was at her political nadir. But I could be wrong.
On the subject of Thomas Jefferson, mentioned in comments above and one of my heroes, to the extent that I have heroes, the very complex slave-owning Apostle of Liberty:
he designed the headstone for his own grave:
‘Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
and Father of the University of Virginia.’
No mention of being President, elected twice.
The Queen is Her Majesty, therefore HM, not HRH.
The speaker could well have added a qualifier, but he didn’t (as far as we know, perhaps his comment was edited, but that seems unlikely). So your nitpick is that I took the gallant Colonel at his (reported) word? He could simply have said ‘all deserving NHS staff‘, but he didn’t, so if he meant to say that, why didn’t he? Perhaps it would have spoiled the occasion if the spectres of those killed by NHS staff and procedures through malice or neglect (including the wilful refusal to use demonstrated effective treatments for covid during the pandemic, and the NHS directors did not even to call for permission to do so afaik) were to intrude on the occasion, would it not? It was clearly not the day to discuss the UK’s cancer survival rates.
As for honours and the Queen, the Garter is a knighthood in her personal gift and it is usual for Prime Ministers to receive it after a ‘cooling-off’ period, when they become ‘Statesmen’. Look at those the Queen awards the Garter to, and they seem nothing out of the ordinary plus Prime Ministers, ignoring the foreign members. Scottish former Prime Ministers customarily get the Order of the Thistle (e.g. Sir Alec Douglas-Home).
Oddly, Mr Blair did not get the Thistle as he is, if anything, Scottish. Gordon Brown is, of course, Gordon Brown, but perhaps his day will come. Harold MacMillan did not get knighted, but eventually got an Earldom, he did get the Order of Merit, which has a sort of reverse snobbery about it as it carries no honorific.
The Garter and Thistle honours were restored to the personal gift of the Sovereign by virtue of Attlee PM and Churchill Leader of the Opposition agreeing it in the late 1940s, perhaps conscious that honours were seen as corrupted by political influence, as was obvious from the early 1920s with the Maundy Gregory scandal (i.e. David Lloyd-George). They are a little bit more subtle in selling honours now, it’s all coincidence, as any search of party donor registers would show.
Sadly, I occasionally come across examples in the press of Maltese people who want to remove the cross of the honour from the national flag. They want this to remove any lingering image of colonialism, etc. All very sad. Apparently, remembrance of courage and heroism is disturbing to some people.
However, given that Malta’s reputation has been tarnished in recent years by various politicians and the murder of a campaigning journalist, known as Daphne, maybe the honour should be stripped from the flag. Rather as how an office’s epaulettes would be torn off after a disciplinary offence.
Fraser,
Thank you for explaining the precedence of former PM’s being admitted to the order.
I remember, in my discussions with Mr Ed, once being a defender of Corporations (indeed I was such a defender for many years) – I am a stubborn old man, it takes a tidal wave of evidence to make me give up on my fond illusions. And it certainly took me many years to give up defending the Corporations.
As for the monarchy – Mr Ed can point to such things as what he outlines in this post (the passionate devotion to “everyone” who has ever served the NHS – and the passionate devotion to the lockdowns and the failure to engage in Early Treatment of Covid 19, indeed the SMEARING of Early Treatment), and I still get misty eyed when I hear “God Save the Queen” – I know the evidence is very strong, but I still cling to my sentiments, rather than taking the position of the man from Huntington and Ely. I will say that the lady is 96 years of age – and is dependent on advice from people who are not worthy of her.
However, a certain Gentleman may shake even my sentimentalism.
“You must all eat insects – whilst I eat steak. You must not have a motor car – whilst I have a private jet. And you must be injected with this toxic stuff – whilst I laugh at you”.
I am NOT saying a certain Gentleman would go down that road – most certainly NOT. But if (if) he did, even I might get a bit less misty eyed on listening to the National Anthem.
As for the performance of the NHS (whether on Covid or other things) – the record is there for those who wish to research it, and it is not that what the establishment say it is. However, the Corporate medicine of the United States also has a problematic record – for example smearing Early Treatment of Covid 19. even dismissing doctors who disagreed with the lies and smears.
For thousands of years a healer was paid directly by their patient, with many healers (although far from all) treating the poor for free – the healer was not paid by a third party, not a government or a corporate bureaucracy. Perhaps all of human history was wrong – and the creation of the Soviet health service in the 1920s (the NHS was 20 years later) was a wonderful thing.
As for how hospitals, often built for the poor (by charitable donation) slipped from the control of doctors to the control of administrators (government or corporate), that is a story for others to tell.