Philip Collins: Away with these baubles of our imperial past

'The July honours included the Principal Dresser to the Knights of the Thistle and a Yeoman Bed Goer'

It was only last February that the Prime Minister declared that he looked forward to a society based on merit. And yet tomorrow we shall again invite one and a half thousand people to receive an imperial award, invidiously ranked and stratified according to no principle of merit at all.

The New Year's honours are far from harmless baubles: it matters profoundly if, when we consider the best that has been done in the nation and seek to reward it, we do so with the panoply of a lost imperial world.

Even in a nation that makes governmental secrecy a fetish, the honours process is still spectacularly closed. The Ceremonial branch of the Cabinet Office receives nominations from councils, MPs, businesses, lobby groups and the public. Names go to government sub-committees in the relevant departments of state, and a revised list is then considered by the central honours committee, which is chaired by Sir Richard Wilson, the head of the civil service.

He is the only member of the committee whose identity is known. All members sit for life. This committee then deletes those that they find unacceptable and makes its recommendations to the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister then proposes a set of awards referring to an empire that no longer exists. The Order of the British Empire (OBE), the most common award, bears the motto "For God And Empire". The OBE, the MBE and the CBE no longer refer to anything meaningful, except to those who still believe in the empire and are stuck in a pre-Suez world.

They do, though, refer to a society that is stratified by social class. We can see this in the peculiar dual meaning that attaches to the word "nobility" in English. On the one hand it refers to those of great standing and moment. At the same time we use the word to refer to those born of highest rank. The same slippage has occurred with the word "aristocracy", which has lost its original meaning of "rule of the best" and has come to mean simply the class of most privileged birth.

People do not need nobility conferred upon them. They have it already and should be rewarded for exhibiting it. As Linda Colley has recently argued: "Calling someone a Lord implies that he lords it over others." Within the ranks of the civil service, the CMG, the KCMG and the GCMG are known as Call Me God, Kindly Call Me God and, best of all, God Calls Me God.

As well as giving out the wrong awards, we are giving them to the wrong people. The political domination of honours is still too great. Despite the abolition, in 1997, of prime ministerial patronage for political service, there are far too many newly ennobled time-servers, self-seeking donors and party hacks gratefully clutching some bauble or other. The honours system is also sexist and too militaristic. Only a third of the OBEs granted in June 2001 went to women and one in eight OBEs were awarded under the military division.

And there are still far too many honours in the gift of the monarch. For example, the Queen still has the power to choose the recipients of the Order of the Garter and its Scottish equivalent, the Order of the Thistle. Of the 24 members of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the highest possible order, five are members of the royal family. The Royal Victorian Order is even more exclusively associated with the Crown, rewarding specific service to the monarchy on a personal level, with recipients chosen by the Queen. The July 2001 honours list, announced on the Queen's official birthday, included honours for, among other members of the royal household, the Principal Dresser to the Knights of the Thistle and a Yeoman Bed Goer. It is almost impossible to get through a whole article about the British honours system without writing a sentence as funny as the last one.

It is time we had an honours system that does not satirise itself. The people on the committee should be outed. Then their plaything, the whole bizarre panoply of OBEs, MBEs, CBEs, DCVOs, MVOs, GCBs, CHs, MNOGs and Yeomen Bed Goers should be put on the bonfire along with the vanity of those who care for such distinctions. We should abolish the titles of Sir and Dame into the bargain.

Instead of all this nonsense we should establish a single award, the Order of Merit. The OM would be given for exceptional service, with an emphasis on community and charity work, for exceptional contributions to the best that has been thought, said and done in the arts, science and sport and for exceptional bravery. The OM should then be awarded at a new democratic ceremony, performed at the House of Commons by the Speaker, dressed in clothes he would be happy to wear on public transport.

The writer is director of the Social Market Foundation