David Olusoga is brave and brilliant. His tomes on black Britons through the ages and programmes on Empire made public truths which most previous keepers of the nation’s story had buried or neglected. Call it unconscious mass misinformation.
In 1984, Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain was published. The author was Peter Fryer, a white historian. The effect of the transformative book on him, says Olusoga, inspired Black and British: A Forgotten History, his groundbreaking book and BBC series.
I have known Olusoga for over 20 years. Time passes, friendships fade. But I admire him as much as ever. This critical column does not change that.
It was triggered by this part of an interview Olusoga did with Rosie Millard in Radio Times this week. It’s worth quoting his words at length, when it was put to him that for a thinker critical of Empire, he had accepted an OBE in 2019.
“I’m often told by privileged white middle-class people that it’s a terrible thing for a Black person to accept an OBE, and I think they underestimate what it means,” he explained to the Radio Times. “It’s a different thing for somebody who is an immigrant to turn down a national honour than it is for someone who was born here… My mother was British, but nationality is patrilineal… I arrived as a little boy from Nigeria and this country, with a lot of help from my mother, invested in me. Turning an honour down would be a snub. And I don’t want to snub a country that I became a citizen of, and which is my nation.” His feelings, his choice, no issue there. It’s the grandstanding that irks.
First, the casual insults chucked at “privileged white, middle-class people”, who believe these honours are ignominious. Racialising this debate is to undermine it. Then, the intellectual laziness and effrontery to imply immigrants all crave this validation. We do not.
Other writers of colour are similarly against such honours. Here is the poet Benjamin Zephaniah in 2003: “No way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire… the truth is I think OBEs compromise writers and poets… I have even heard black writers who have collected OBEs saying that it is ‘symbolic of how far we have come’. Oh yes, I say, we’ve struggled so hard just to get a minute with the Queen and we are so very grateful – not.” Zephaniah, whom I loved and confided in, shamed me on Channel 4 for accepting an MBE. I sent it back.
Here is George the Poet in 2019: “I turned down an MBE. A friend asked me if I would accept it, I just saw my parents’ faces and without thinking I said ‘yes’ and then I took a minute and reflected, reflected on my status and I felt a burning sensation in my chest… Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down and took turns. They did that every day for a couple hundred years and then left her to treat her own burns.”
Even more disappointing is Olusoga’s apparent apathy towards a system that to me looks open to widespread corruption and routine debasements. All PMs, including Starmer, who promised better, stuff the Lords with friendly rich peers and hand out honours to big donors, political plotters and movers. For every one and a half days that Liz Truss was in power, she created a peer – 32 in total, though many were carry-overs from Boris Johnson, who had quit in disgrace. Think about that.
Analysis of Cabinet Office data by the BBC of the 2025 honours list found only 6 per cent of higher awards went to Northerners and only 4 per cent to people from working-class backgrounds. More than 60 per cent of beneficiaries of “higher” awards, such as Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and knighthoods and damehoods, lived in London and south-east England. There was more diversity in the lower honours.
In 2013, Transparency International found two-thirds of UK respondents thought that political parties were corrupt. Not only are too many men and women of dubious character given medals, the ceremonies affirm the monarchy and confer on the Windsors respect they have never earned. Furthermore, no ordinary mechanism exists to strip the titles from life peers like Peter Mandelson or Michelle Mone.
The right-wing media, including GB News has responded enthusiastically to Olusoga’s words. He has a new show starting. His words have certainly caught the headlines. Short-term gain, perhaps. But was it worth risking the respect he has built up, brick by brick?
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