New Year’s Honours List

The latest New Year Honours once again reflects the great and the good of society. On January 1^st 979 people, the usual hodgepodge of senior civil servants, ageing rock stars (Status Quo in this case) and people who have campaigned against carrier bags woke up with some extra letters before or after their names. With an absence of real obvious bastards like Jeffrey Archer on the Honours List there was little public outcry, but reading a little deeper it looks like quite a few unsavoury characters were honoured for their crimes- sorry, their work.

Andrew Dillon, Chief Executive of the organization National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) was knighted. Nice is the organization which rations drugs capable of saving or prolonging lives according to their cost. Criticised for blocking access to certain dementia drugs, Nice has also denied patients access to life-prolonging cancer drugs: at the end of last year it turned down a lung cancer drug that extends patients’ lives by an average of five months. In November, the only licensed drug that can extend the lives of patients with liver cancer was rejected by Nice. In October, a drug that is used in most of Europe to treat advanced breast cancer was also turned down by the government body.

As a result of rationing by Nice, all under the watchful eye of founder and CEO Andrew Dillon, terminally ill patients have had to remortgage homes to prolong their lives or face an early death sentence. If I may be forgiven for being a little trite, Nice is really not that nice at all.

Dillon wasn’t the only one of the NHS top brass to have got a reward to supplement a tidy salary. If you’re one of the many Britons struggling to find a dentist – or if you have one and the service is as patchy as the rest of us have come to expect – you’ll be pleased to know that the head of the NHS dental system is also being rewarded. Nice work, Barry Cockroft CBE.

Then we have Timothy Dowse, one of the intelligence experts at Whitehall who discovered Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and aided in the drive to war. Just one teensy problem: the weapons didn’t exist. Giving evidence at the inquest into the Iraq War, Dowse said: “I also believed for a long time that we would find them, because I, at that stage, found it hard to believe that there would have been so much reporting from before the war without there being some fire behind that smoke.” Dowse also stressed at the inquiry that more care should have been taken with intelligence, which seems a fair assessment in light of the six year war that raged on a false premise and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians who died as a result.

Cressida Dick, the Senior Police Officer who led the botched operation which resulted in the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, has also been honoured for “distinguished service”. A year ago an inquest jury rejected the police’s claim that de Menezes, an innocent man shot dead as a terrorist, was lawfully killed. His family are said to be angry at the award.

It’s easy to complain that awards aren’t distributed fairly. Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan to the Best Picture Oscar for god’s sake. But this isn’t just unfair- this is downright laughable. We live in a world where not merely ineptitude but complicity in the death of innocent people is up for reward: a world so topsy turvy that Barack Obama can send more troops to Afghanistan, bomb Pakistan and then still receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

And even when awards are relatively genuine, there’s still the incident of the Associated Press granting a horse second place in its latest Female Athlete of the Year awards. Yes, you read that correctly: obviously frustrated by the lack of genuine women athletes in the world, they decided that the only one better than a horse was Serena Williams. It’s good to know that respect for women is on the rise.