November 8, 2021 - 3:00pm
Yesterday an investigation by the Sunday Times and OpenDemocracy examined how donors to the Conservative party kept mysteriously ending up with peerages. The story caused a a predictable outcry. But placed in the context of British political history it was typical.
Along with “six weeks to save the NHS”, “Cash for Honours” is one of the most enduring tropes of British political life. In September one of Prince Charles’ senior aides was accused of having sold a CBE to a Saudi businessman for a £1,5 million donation to one of the Prince’s charities. In October, it was alleged that someone had bought a life peerage for £150,000 in party political donations.
All of these stories have fomented the usual backlash — tiresome think pieces about how the whole damned honours system should be thrown away or reformed. Of course, I don’t know if any of the accusations are true — but even if people somewhere in this country are selling honours for filthy lucre, so what?
Think about it. The CBE is a nice blue cross hung on a ribbon. It’s pretty, but the idea that putting those three letters behind your name is worth the price of a central London one-bedroom flat is insane. Sometimes you can’t even give them away for free. When Mrs Thatcher offered one to her election guru Gordon Reece, he was so offended by its lowly status that he told her to get stuffed. The filmmaker Michael Winner once refused the even lower-ranking OBE because it’s “what you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross station”.
Sell a thousand CBEs for £1.5 million and the Royal Navy could pay for a new destroyer. Is the honour of the now-defunct British Empire really worth that much?
Peerages are a trickier business — they carry some real-life benefits. You get an attendance allowance if you show up at the House of Lords, and being a lord does make it easier to book tables at restaurants. If someone got one for £100,000, the real scandal would be that it was sold so cheaply. In any society, there is going to be influence-peddling and the rich are always going to have an outsized influence on politics: why not charge them the full economic cost, instead of under-selling and pretending to be outraged at the idea afterward?
If anything, Britain should adopt an open and transparent approach to honours selling. Thailand, for instance, publishes an official price list for honours: for a measly 1,500,000 bahts, or about £33,000, you can become a Companion of The Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn, which is roughly equivalent to a CBE. The Chakri dynasty which grants them is far more interesting than the Windsors: the Thai king’s ancestors were leading punitive expeditions on war elephants when the later Hanoverians were busy contracting gout and having affairs with B-list actresses. Yet people are (allegedly) willing to pay 40 times more money for the British version: that’s what British soft power looks like.
In any case, we already accept the idea that money can buy you prestige or even immortality of a sort. You can buy the naming rights to about anything, from park benches to university chairs. Oxford has recently auctioned the naming rights to its newest college for £80 million, which will enable a lot of clever people to do clever things. Another college, Linacre, will be renamed for a cool £150 million, losing the name of the man who taught Greek to Erasmus for that of the queen of Vietnamese discount airlines, but financing a lot of scholarships in the process.
Vanity has always been a powerful inducement for the wealthy to give away lots of money for good causes instead of hoarding their cash, and there is no reason the honours system should not operate on similar principles, in addition to honouring the conventionally worthy, of course.
Don’t think of selling honours as corruption, but as a form of indirect taxation on human frailty.
Yuan Yi Zhu is an assistant professor at Leiden University and a research fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford.
yuanyi_z
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SubscribeI would much rather have the House of Lords stuffed with people who know how wealth is created than with those whose only experience has been how to destroy wealth.
The power of the Lords is after all today somewhat limited. That said the attendance allowance should be done away with to reflect Noblesse Oblige. The honour should be sufficient.
If we are too squeamish to sell membership of the House of Lords then a return to the sale of the rank of Baronet should be instituted. Worth much more than a mere knighthood.
The lords actually get to influence parliamentary process over and above the electorate. The idea this might have legitimacy based on who nominated them or the size of their ‘contribution’ is another attack on democracy.
Your argument is that corruption is inevitable, so we should just embrace it?
Good idea. And set the price by auction.
I did not really read the article as I know it will be another cynical, modern anti British thing from some young mindset…
But the HoL never should have stopped just being the hereditary Lords and the Bishops – once the commoners got in it was over. It is like letting the children get equal votes with the parents, it is a disaster. At least the Aristocracy have a vested interest, a lineage, and some Nobility. Naturally it is stacked with the British equivalent of ‘The Squad’ with the Labour PMs getting to elevate degenerates and crazies to ‘Rub the Right’s nose in it’, as Blair so eloquently put it.
Before people become excited about this alleged selling of peerages, we should bear in mind the political make up of the Lords, after 6 years of Conservative government (some say 11 years).
It remains non-Conservative enough to cause real difficulties to the ELECTED government of the day.
Of course it is stuffed with too many peers; too many Labour, Liberal Democrat and ‘cross-benchers’ with consistent opposition voting records, and Conservatives as fierce in undermining the elected government as anyone. At one point since July 2019, I half-expected Boris to appoint 500 peers so as to smooth his path.