THERE’S a wind howling outside as I sway towards the curtain, fling it open, and blink in the sunlight of 2026.

A cardboard cutout of Roger Moore has joined me to stare at the hungover moon in the pale blue sky, reminders both of why Hogmanay warrants a two-day bank holiday around these parts.

Brandishing his Walther PPK as passers-by with typical panache, the dead tax exile knight’s presence also stands as a cruel reminder that I have once again been overlooked in the New Year’s Honours list.

It’s a disappointment I’ve had to live with all my life; my mother being rushed into giving birth on Hogmanay so the nurses could get a New Year dram in denied me the honour of being the first born in Ayrshire in 1979.

I’m not sure a knighthood could ever make up for the years of never having a birthday party, it’s a cross I’ll have to bear, but gongs aren’t the cleansing agents they once were.

The best birthday gift this year was reading that someone I’m proud to call a friend knocked back her MBE. That someone like Tressa Burke, chief executive of the Glasgow Disability Alliance, should have an honour conferred upon her is not offensive in and of itself. After all, if a fake secret agent can be knighted, why shouldn’t someone who has helped lead campaigns to make our world less disabling for thousands have their efforts acknowledged?

Much is made, when these trinkets are awarded, of people from all walks of life being included. A glance at the carefully curated list will confirm this of course, but only in the same way that the BBC can claim to employ state-educated people. Sure, they exist, but in numbers so disproportionately small that pointing them out merely confirms the problem rather than successfully masking it.

Most states have some sort of honours system. The USSR had an award for excellence in just about every field of endeavour — topped by the title of Hero of the Soviet Union — and, in very much a case of the system protesting too much, the US has its Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Here, in classic style, the state confers a series of medals ranking recipients from members of the British empire to its commanders — the ranks of an empire that does not exist.

Many will be more than comfortable to accept and bask in this imagined glorious past, others will be straightforwardly flattered after a life of service and little material reward, and will choose to actively set aside these matters of title as mere historical hangovers and reconcile accepting the award as an acknowledgement of something wider.

Maybe there is something in that final point, maybe there are times when someone from group so forgotten in previous lists or marginalised in society as a whole appearing on the list can not only provide cover for the establishment that has failed them but draw attention to the cause.

There is, as they say, an arguable case for it on that basis, as almost a subversion of the establishment that hands most of its gongs out to those who explicitly serve the status quo.

What a status quo it is too. Emergency food parcels, which a couple of decades ago were a relative rarity, are now being doled out in their millions, many of them to people working endless hours to scramble together enough to pay their landlord’s mortgage.

The crowning glory of that status quo is to convince the very people being systematically robbed by an army of Rachmans that it is their fault, that it is their lack of ingenuity or hard work that has left them relying on charity to eat.

The effectiveness of this cannot be underestimated. Speaking to a friend over New Year, he mentioned to me how he and his family used to watch the Budget announcements growing up, because being reliant on social security it was that day more than anything else in the year that would dictate how they would live. He’s far from alone in that, but then he said something that quite shocked me: “We weren’t working class, because my mum and dad weren’t working.”

His mum did work and does still well into old age, and a damn sight harder that most knights out there I’d wager. How can it be that a mother, and a full-time carer to her husband for decades, can arrive at the place where they are not only facing the isolation and alienation that comes with that work, comes to believe that that work isn’t work at all?

The reasons are clear, because even if they do not sit in the conscious actions or thoughts of any individual, our economic and social system couldn’t survive the truth that carers provide billions of pounds worth of support to millions every day on incomes even more insulting than those paid carers have to endure.

Better then to tinker here and there, drive a desperation so great that an inflation-linked increase to poverty-inducing income feels like a victory, to divide the worker from the full-time carers, and the full-time carer from those who cannot work: the non-commissioned ranks in an empire of spectacular separation, of cruelty, and of sheer greed.

The sprinkling of service medals amongst our ranks is not designed to change that, but I’m not sure it will do much to paper over the cracks for much longer either.

When Tressa was offered an MBE, she knew it could be an acknowledgement of the work of the Glasgow Disability Alliance, and might well have chosen to make that arguable case for acceptance on that basis.

Instead, Tressa wrote to the palace, not as some sort of anointed individual, or even as a representative of the alliance, but as a human who lives in a world that not only actively disables vast swathes of its population, but positively blames them for their own suffering.

“I cannot accept a personal honour because disabled people are being so dishonoured at this time,” she said.

“We are being demonised, dehumanised and scape-goated for political choices and policy failures by consecutive governments.

“Disabled people are becoming more unwell due to unfair, inadequate and inaccessible work, barriers to securing work, inadequate benefit levels and rising extra costs including backdoor taxation for social care support and rising costs like heating, clothing and vital independent living equipment.”

Turning to the actions and the appalling rhetoric of the Labour government — led at present by the be-knighted Keir Starmer — she continued:

“The Budget includes no commitments for social care, accessible transport, adapted housing, education or national wheelchair services and this lack of investment and missed opportunity on disability related spending will deepen existing inequalities and leave disabled people facing exclusion, isolation, homelessness and unsafe care levels.

“The negative framing of disabled people, including references to ‘luxury’ cars and reforming welfare ‘so that it doesn’t pay to be off sick rather than work’ is misleading and belies reality.”

Every. Single. Word.

I could perhaps have reluctantly forgiven Tressa if she had chosen to accept and use the publicity of receiving an MBE to draw attention to her organisation, its works and the trials disabled people face every day, but as someone once said, she chose the path less travelled and that makes all the difference.

Why offer a fig-leaf to a system that’s failing us all for a bit of publicity when she could get just as much for shining a light on its championing individual over the collective, its dishonour, and its hypocrisy?

Existing to suppress and subjugate, rob and hoard, empires never really change.

I won’t hold my breath for that knighthood, nor should you. Take a deep breath of clear air and get ready for the year ahead.

Empires fall.