The New Years Honours this year had a few interesting surprises — not only did we see the DJ Pete Tong get the recognition he deserves for his services to DJing (I hear the Queen loves chillaxing to a phat beat), but the left-wing firebrand Owen Jones was also recognised for his services to basket weaving. Whilst these honours may seem like a bit of fun — or at best a nice tokenistic way of recognising the contribution of lollipop ladies and singers — I can’t help but be disturbed by an insidious side-effect of having the gongs dished out to the great and the good. To put it in hyperbolic terms, aren’t they just another tool the state uses to maintain the status quo?

Okay, so the master basket weaver may have been a different Owen Jones, but if you look at the list, apart from the handful of celebrities (Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs?!), there’s a hell of a lot of people with some very boring sounding jobs.

Professors, councillors, chief-executives, and of course, MPs — all of the great and the not-so-good are all represented. Essentially — anyone doing a Big Job in “public life”, if they play their cards right can be in with a chance of a gong and all of the cultural cachet that comes with it. And at risk of sounding like some sort of revolutionary — this leads to complicity with the system and gives all of these people a small stake in the status quo… and this erodes our democracy.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not accusing any individuals of deliberately acting like this — but this can be an unfortunate outcome of the net effect of thousands of individuals all angling for letters after their names.

To create and sustain a modern liberal-democratic state, you need a number of different ingredients. In his 2011 book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama boils this down to three key concepts: rule of law (the government is constrained by laws and cannot act arbitrarily), strong government (the government have, say, a monopoly on the use of force, in order to maintain the law) and accountable government (we can hold the people in power to account for their actions). The problem with the honours system is that it undermines this: Honours are essentially buying the complicity of the class of people who might be in a position to affect change.

If we got into a situation where there was a potential constitutional crisis — say, a supposedly neutral Prince meddling in political affairs… who is going to forcefully speak out against this? If you were a prominent public figure who could speak out or act to stop something like that — in addition to the myriad of other factors, at the back of your mind there may also be a nagging feeling that if you slag off the Prince, you can wave goodbye to that “Big K”.

There’s a historical precedent for this sort of action too. In the same book Fukuyama tells the story of the 16th century Muscovy regime (which later became modern Russia) — which used the sale of honorific titles and privileges to create disunity amongst the aristocratic class that could have plausibly challenged what the rulers were up to, and instead set them against each other, competing for titles. This wasn’t unique either — similar sales also occurred in France and Spain a few hundred years ago.

Similarly, I wonder if our honours system is no doubt providing a similar service to retaining the current status quo? Whilst I’d never claim that honours are the most important factor in conceptualising how our political system is organised — it is certainly going to be a sticking point.

At a time when many people on the left think we need to radically rethink how our society is organised economically, the CEO of Virgin Money has received a CBE for services to banking as part of the same honours system… can the likes of Owen Jones really weave enough protest baskets to move such an entrenched class of people into demanding the changes that the left might want?