Any honours list, whether issued at New Year, the Queen’s birthday or the departure of a prime minister, invariably leads to copious amounts of eye-rolling.
It’s hard to do otherwise when you scan names of time-served senior civil servants and diplomats, quango chiefs and bankers – the sort of folk who won’t have to worry about their pensions – being handed gongs simply for doing their very well-paid jobs.
Many of us probably thought things had reached the nadir when, on leaving office, Theresa May saw fit to give a knighthood to Oliver Robbins, her former close adviser and chief Brexit negotiator. Talk about rewarding failure.
But the sheer outrage over the knighthood given to Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith (also at the behest of Mrs May) is of a different order altogether. And little wonder. Sir Iain, the chief architect of the loathsome universal credit system that has pushed so many low-paid families, disabled people, those unable to work due to acute illness, the long-term unemployed and/or those not lucky enough to have a family that can bail them out when life takes a turn for the worse, into poverty.
New Year Honours list: 'Serious questions' over disastrous leak of addresses
At the time of writing a petition started by an NHS psychiatrist who says she regularly treats people dealing with chronic anxiety, panic attacks, depression and suicide attempts directly brought on by the stress of an assessment system that threatens to – and often does – cut payments on a cruel and arbitrary basis, has reached 130,000 signatures. I don’t doubt it will gain many more.
Sir Iain probably sees things very differently, of course. Doubtless he will view himself as a committed public servant and think back to his “Easterhouse Epiphany” in 2002, when he stood outside dilapidated flats in the east end of Glasgow on the verge of tears. Tory leader at the time, he not only admitted his party had let such communities down, but promised to make amends. The old “compassionate Conservatism” chestnut was mooted again.
Indeed, it was this visit to Easterhouse that apparently inspired Sir Iain’s creation of Universal Credit when he became Work and Pensions Secretary under David Cameron in 2010, a position he held for six years. In his defence, the system we see today is not what he originally envisioned. Sir Iain, in agreement many others from across the party divide, initially waxed lyrical about a simplified benefits regime that would always make work pay.
But delays, complexities, miss-steps and continual cuts to funding dogged the system from the outset and in 2016 he washed his hands of it, his head turned by the Brexiteer cause.
Needless to say, those claiming benefits didn’t have the luxury of walking away, instead finding themselves trapped in a brutal and punishing quagmire that is neither simplified nor allows work to pay.
Whatever way you look at it, Sir Iain is a failure. He and his department failed to make the changes necessary to carry out his vision. He failed to get a handle on problems when they emerged. He failed to persuade the chancellor not to cut his funding. He failed to stick with it. He failed to introduce compassionate Conservatism. He failed the people of Easterhouse.
New Year Honours list: 'Serious questions' over disastrous leak of addresses
Is there a more potent or perfect example of the rottenness of an honours system that actually rewards the privileged, wealthy and powerful for heaping misery on the ordinary, struggling and vulnerable? It’s hard to think of one.
This is exactly the sort of moment that makes people call for the whole shebang to be scrapped, or for other recipients to turn down their awards.
As tempting as it is to agree, I can’t help thinking either course of action is disrespectful to the vast majority of those receiving gongs, the deserving community champions and charity campaigners that spend their lives helping and supporting the very vulnerable groups Sir Iain and his ilk leave behind without a second thought.
With this in mind, let’s push for the honours system to be changed rather than disbanded, for the politicians and bankers to be dropped, allowing more awards to go to those who genuinely deserve recognition for their community and societal achievements; the selfless souls who go above and beyond the call of duty and always seem humbled to be recognised at all.
Indeed, rather than expending any more energy on Iain Duncan Smith, let's turn our attention to them.
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