During a ceremony at Windsor Castle on Tuesday, Her Majesty the Queen bestowed the George Cross on the National Health Service. The Prince of Wales was in attendance, as were a select group of ‘health leaders and workers’ from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The honour was announced last year, when the country was still flush with excitement from the successful vaccine rollout and a whiff of the Covid equivalent of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ still remained.
Twelve months on and that spirit has evaporated. Boris Johnson, the Glorious Leader, has been overthrown, the NHS is in a ruinous state with a care backlog of 6 million patients and rising. Even the legacy of Captain Tom, the symbol of the plucky defiance, has been tarnished with the Charity Commission investigating how his family managed the millions raised by the old soldier.
Handed the honour of promulgating the George Cross citation was Lieutenant Colonel Michael Vernon, Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. ‘This award recognises all NHS staff, past and present, across all disciplines and all four nations,’ he said. ‘Over more than seven decades, and especially in recent times, you have supported the people of our country with courage, compassion and dedication, demonstrating the highest standards of public service. You have our enduring thanks and heartfelt appreciation.’
The George Cross has been awarded collectively twice before, to the island of Malta in 1942 and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in 1999, a year after the Good Friday Agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland.
By awarding the George Cross to the NHS the Queen has added to the deification of a deeply dysfunctional organisation
Throughout the Troubles, the RUC paid a heavy price for policing the streets, as the citation for the George Cross acknowledged:
‘For the past 30 years, the Royal Ulster Constabulary has been both the bulwark against, and the main target of, a sustained and brutal terrorism campaign…302 officers have been killed in the line of duty and thousands more injured, many seriously. Many officers have been ostracised by their own community and others have been forced to leave their homes in the face of threats to them or their families.’
Malta was awarded its George Cross in April 1942 after withstanding months of aerial attacks by German and Italian bombers throughout the winter of 1941/42. As well as possessing many airfields, the island was an important British naval base, whose ships were sending many Axis supply vessels, en route to North Africa, to the bottom of the Mediterranean.
I knew an artillery officer, Lt Jimmy Hughes, who had been stationed on the island throughout what came to be known as the Siege of Malta. The experience, which he recorded in a diary, remained with him for life. A typical entry was Tuesday March 24 1942:
‘Heaviest raids yet experienced since I arrived. Ju 88s [German bomber aircraft] seemed to fill the sky as they attacked the Grand Harbour….after lunch formations of Stukas [dive bombers], escorted by German fighters, attacked Safi and Hal Far aerodromes, sometimes diving at angles of eighty degrees.’
In honouring Malta with the George Cross, King George VI declared in a handwritten letter to the island’s governor that his people’s heroism and devotion ‘will long be famous in history’.
His daughter has given the same award to an organisation that is unlikely to hold the same accolade. Infamous, perhaps, given its current decrepit state and last week’s revelation by the Evening Standard that 117,000 people died on NHS waiting lists last year.
That’s not to denigrate the many hard-working and dedicated staff, particularly those on the wards, who were a credit to their profession at the height of Covid two years ago.
Nevertheless, they do not deserve to be honoured in the same way as RUC officers who risked their lives every day or the civilians in Malta who, to escape the incessant aerial attacks, were forced to live in tunnels and caves where many suffered from tuberculosis, rickets and dysentery.
The NHS George Cross also diminishes the heroism of individuals who were awarded the medal, such as Nora Inayat-Khan. She was a secret agent during the war, who spent months gathering intelligence in Paris under the noses of the Nazis before she was caught, tortured and executed.
In awarding the George Cross to the NHS the Queen has added to the deification of a deeply dysfunctional organisation. Worse, she has devalued the medal to which her beloved father gave his name.
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