The Letter

I didn’t see coming…

I have accepted a CBE. I know, wild.

This is something I never thought I’d do. I was emphatic about it; for years I told folk not to nominate me under any circumstances. Then, a few weeks ago, a letter arrived from the Cabinet Office.

I’d love to tell you I approached this decision with calm and intellectual rigour. I did not. I was emotional and conflicted. I oscillated wildly between “Absolutely not” and “What if I did?” Eventually someone — naming no names, my husband Lee (a socialist, FYI) — told me to get off my high horse and asked whether I realised how precious I was sounding. In fairness, this is one of the many reasons we’ve survived thirty-three years together.

The fact is, I was astonished. Not in a performative, false-modesty sort of way. Genuinely. Why me? I know that sounds odd. I’ve spent much of my career encouraging people, particularly women, to own their achievements and stop diminishing themselves. But I’m still that working-class girl from North London, so when I thought about a CBE, I didn’t think about ceremonies or titles. I thought about where I come from.

I was also deeply moved. Someone had taken the time to nominate me. Other people had supported that nomination. Whatever happened next, that generosity deserved respect and proper consideration. Whoever it was — thank you.

I do an exceptional job. I am not an exceptional person. An honour suggests you’re beautifully perched on some moral high ground. The fact is, I don’t have the hips to perch anywhere — people who know me will tell you so. I fall off pedestals, literally and figuratively, on the regular — there are probably photos.

Despite all that, I’ve also been incredibly privileged: a product of the social mobility generation, with people on my side and a neurospicy hyper-focus on the world of mental health and justice.

The more I thought about where I come from, the more complicated the question became. Because the truth is, there was a reason I had always assumed I’d say no.

Why I Always Said No

People should be celebrated for the difference they make, but the systems and symbols through which that happens also matter. The British Empire no longer exists as a political reality, though its legacy plainly does, still shaping families, communities and opportunities. Empire is not a footnote in the honours system. It’s literally in the title.

All the time I spent confidently telling people what I would do, and how I would refuse, reminds me now of the smug things I used to say about parenting before I was a parent. I’ve long admired the people who turn honours down; some of them I know and love in real life.

My family story, like a lot of British family stories, is tangled up with colonialism, migration, race and belonging — not in an abstract way, but lived, and sometimes suffered. There were things the first generation — our elders, the ones who came to this country — simply didn’t talk about. Sometimes to protect their children. Sometimes because there was pain in the telling. Sometimes, I suspect, because there was shame. They survived by keeping moving, and what they passed down were fragments — stories, warnings, instincts.

Perhaps that’s why so many of us who came after inherited a sharp sensitivity to injustice without always knowing where it came from; the anger arrived before the explanation. I’ve carried that anger all my life, and it has fuelled much of my work.

I do think the honours system needs to be revolutionised: a way of celebrating excellence without the weight of imperial language, one that reflects the Britain we are — who we want to be — rather than the Britain we used to be. That’s why I support the Excellence Not Empire Campaign.

I’m not immune to flattery, I am human. It obviously feels good to be recognised, and whilst I am many things, spiritually evolved beyond recognition is not one of them. But in the end the tension wasn’t about flattery. It was about whether I could accept and still recognise myself afterwards. A yes had to be about something beyond personal recognition — a reason that could sit honestly alongside the discomfort.

By this point I still thought no, and had told my family to let it go. And then the Unite the Kingdom march happened, and my thinking changed in a way I hadn’t expected.

Why I Said Yes

I stumbled across a video from the march, which I’d been trying to avoid. People worry about this country for real and legitimate reasons — housing, jobs, public services, the future — and when times are hard, intolerance thrives and people get swept up and radicalised. But let’s not pretend everyone there needed sweeping up. Some people carry the rage already, and needed no reason to incite or step into racist violence.

There was one particular moment that broke me. I won’t repeat it here, because even reading about it would cause harm to people I care about. It was profoundly racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic. I watched it several times because I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. Each time I felt the same thing: fury. I sat for a long time in hot, angry tears.

The people running these movements talk about defending Britain, but what they are defending bears little resemblance to the Britain I dream about. And the shame of it is that none of this is new. It has been building for generations, and racialised communities have recognised it all along. The prejudice. The suspicion. The constant questioning of who belongs and who doesn’t.

What’s changed in recent years is the political permission. Over the last decade, I’ve watched ideas that once lived at the fringes move steadily towards the centre. Brexit didn’t create those attitudes, but it gave them a superpower: prejudice can now be expressed openly, publicly and with fewer consequences.

What happened after the march caught me off guard. Somewhere in the middle of my anger, I found myself wanting to fight for Britain. I was tired of letting people whose politics are rooted in exclusion define patriotism on behalf of the rest of us. Tired of watching people who would regard families like mine as permanent outsiders claim ownership of a country that my family, and millions of others, have spent generations literally building.

I was having one of those lone rants at imaginary protagonists - I’ve left the expletives out but know they were there too! You think you represent Britain? Because I think you’ll find that I am British. My family is British. For the first time since the letter arrived, I looked at the honour differently. Not because the moral tension had gone, but because I saw a moment in time where people like me need to be visible and louder than ever.

Declining the honour would not stop people like this defining Britain. It would not challenge their version of patriotism. It would not make their voices quieter. Occupying space might. Being louder might. I don’t write that as an observer. I write it as someone who intends to spend the rest of my life fighting for a world where people are not in danger because of their race, their faith, or simply because they exist.

Then, by some joy of fate, I was reminded of the Britain I love. I watched the celebrations in North London after Arsenal — our team, forever — won the league. Thousands of people of every background poured into the streets where I grew up. Different faiths, different histories, different family stories, all out together.

This is us. This is what’s possible — and that’s the vision I’m not going to let go.

As I sat with the decision, my thoughts kept returning to the work that has shaped most of my life. If I was going to accept this honour, I needed to be honest with myself about what it might actually be useful for.

I’ve worked in mental health for thirty-six years. My first job was at fifteen, which tells you something about employment law in the 1980s, and everything about how long I’ve been at this. These were the early days of Care in the Community, a transformational vision that sought to replace institutions with support rooted in people’s communities and lives.

Since then I’ve worked, sleeves rolled up, in therapeutic communities, prisons, home care, crisis care and residential services, research and policy, often on interventions nobody had tried before — the kind of thing that gets called pioneering at the time and obvious twenty years later.

I started out as a peripatetic worker, a job title I held for several years before I could spell it, and moved from there into managing services and then running organisations. I’d love to tell you I drifted into leadership, but I didn’t. I’ve wanted to lead Mind since I was eighteen, which has become a bit of Mind Federation folklore because, annoyingly, it’s true.

What grew over the years wasn’t my ambition. It was my frustration.

At fifteen, I assumed we’d have cracked it by now: community instead of institutions, prevention instead of crisis, hospitals that didn’t harm. It all seemed so obviously right that I thought time would do the rest.

Thirty-six years later, I’m still making the same arguments.

Because we’ve become much better at talking about mental health, it’s tempting to believe things are better all round. They aren’t. We are far less good at changing what happens to the people who live with the worst of it.

Those with the most severe and enduring mental illnesses are still too often left behind — still waiting for somewhere safe to live, someone who knows them, support that arrives before the crisis rather than after it.

And the wards that should be the safest places in the system are too often the places families fear most. Inpatient care should be safe, dignified and focused on healing. We shouldn’t still have to demand it.

In many ways, we’re fighting the same fight all over again. The list would be instantly recognisable to my fifteen-year-old self, which should embarrass us all and knowing her she would be raging!

I’ve seen care at its worst, and I won’t pretend otherwise — people and families failed by services, by policy and sometimes by all of us. But I’ve also watched lives rebuilt, families finding their way back to each other, communities deciding that someone written off was worth rallying around after all.

I’ve watched people who had lost all hope being found again by mental health workers determined to make a difference. I’ve watched staff, volunteers and peers do this work in the hardest circumstances imaginable — under-resourced, overstretched, with demand and pressure running red most of the time — and somehow still show up with their humanity intact.

So if a CBE gets me into more rooms where those arguments need making — louder, and to people who can no longer pretend they didn’t hear them — then I’ll take that deal.

Because after thirty-six years, I’ve learnt something simple: People don’t recover because we got better at talking about mental health.

They recover when help actually shows up.

Insider Radical

Once the rage had passed and I’d moved closer to acceptance, there was something else I had to confront: a truth I’d spent years resisting. When you become Chief Executive of a national charity, you become part of the establishment — and for someone like me, that’s not without consequences, or free of moral injury.

The reality is hard to deny. I sit in rooms where decisions are made. I meet ministers. I help shape conversations that affect people’s lives. Whether I like it or not, I have proximity to power, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. My wonderful coach Garfield often reminds me that I still fear someone grabbing me by the scruff and throwing me out. A very Dickensian image and, annoyingly, not entirely inaccurate.

For a long time I worried that meant I’d lost something. I will always worry about it. Proximity to power risks diluting the values that brought me into leadership in the first place — and if I spend too long inside institutions, I might become one.

I’ve spent years wanting to be an activist. The people I admire most are, and so are many of my closest friends. Many of the changes I care about would never have happened without people willing to organise, protest and apply pressure from the outside. But after years of anti-racism learning, sitting alongside abolitionists and community organisers, I realised I could not honestly describe myself as an activist leader. My role is different.

I’m an insider radical. That’s how I think of myself, anyway. Someone who believes institutions can and must change, and who has chosen to spend much of her life trying to change them from within. It’s not a comfortable position. It means being too radical for some and not radical enough for others. It means accepting that progress is often slower than you’d like and a lot messier. Welcome to leadership.

There is, of course, a writer looking over my shoulder as I make this argument. So much of my feminist thinking rests on Audre Lorde, who warned that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. By her measure, I have just accepted a commemorative set of the master’s tools. The thought of disappointing her stings more than any criticism heading my way.

I don’t have a clever answer for her. Only an honest one. I am already inside the house. That is a fact I can’t deny and a position I can’t walk away from. It’s a contradiction I carry, not one I’ve resolved — and I’ve stopped expecting to. Leadership rarely resolves contradictions. Mostly it asks you to choose which ones you can live with, and what you intend to do while carrying them. What I can do is take the other thing Lorde taught me just as seriously: that my silence will not protect me, or anyone else.

I’d spent so much time worrying that a CBE would make me part of the establishment. That ship sailed years ago. What recognition does create is visibility — and visibility, used properly, can be turned into something useful. At a moment when conversations about equity and inclusion feel increasingly fragile, and when some people seem determined to shrink our sense of who belongs, visibility is armour.

This honour wasn’t asking me to become someone different. It was asking whether I was prepared to step up. I’ve been outspoken all my life; most people who know me will tell you I don’t need more encouragement. But if this recognition creates opportunities to amplify the causes and communities I care about, I intend to rinse every bit of it.

None of it, though — the platform, the job, the so-called proximity to power — started with me.

The People Who Got Me Here

My paternal grandfather was a Glaswegian RAF serviceman who met my South African grandmother while stationed abroad. At some point in the late 1940s she boarded a ship with a young child and travelled thousands of miles to Scotland to build a life with the man she loved. I don’t think I’ll ever fully grasp the courage that took. She was a force — beautiful, eccentric, funny and stubborn. She raised seven children and spent years as the only brown woman on her council estate in one of the poorest parts of Glasgow. I often think about what she lived through, and what she chose not to tell us.

My mother’s family are Irish; my grandparents came to England in the 50s for work. The men worked for Murphy’s and built roads across the country, and I would beam with pride when my grandad and uncle rolled up in the big green lorry. They created community and networks and brought music and dancing with them; the memory of my kinfolk stepping through the Siege of Ennis on wooden floors well into the night will stay with me forever.

My Grandmothers Bernadette & Ethel

My Mum and Dad met in late 1973. By 1975 they had me. My Mum was 17 when I was born, and teachers and others told her she would amount to nothing — literally, and to her face. But my mum, who even then had the look that still scares me now, looked right back at them and said “watch me”. As she presides over her family today — damn straight she did what she set out to do.

My folks 5th October 1974 - The Wedding Day

Our home was never quiet. It was the kind of place where family, friends and neighbours drifted in and out constantly. People slept on sofas, shared beds, stayed for dinner and somehow ended up staying for breakfast too. There was always somebody making tea, somebody telling stories and somebody laughing too loudly. In fact, if you rang the bell, one of us would throw the key out of an upstairs window. This worked perfectly until somebody failed to catch it and we’d all end up shouting directions into the dark while they rummaged through the flower beds.

At the time, it seemed completely normal. Looking back, I realise what a gift it was. If you needed somewhere safe, there was usually room for one more.

Summers were spent travelling between Kilbeggan and Abbeyfeale, my grandparents’ hometowns, on the farm with my elders — listening to stories, watching people work, absorbing things that felt ordinary then and precious now. Long weekends in Scotland gave me my political edge. I mean, have you ever had a political argument with a Glaswegian? It’s not for the weak.

Me, my Uncle Jack and my baby goat Wilbur!

My dad arrived in England at fifteen, worked hard, became involved in housing activism and community organising, and spent much of his life bringing people together. If you scroll through my social media, you’ll find old photographs of him chairing a housing co-operative meeting with a young Jeremy Corbyn sitting nearby. To be fair, it’s so stereotypically North London that it borders on parody.

My Dad the community activist 1976

But that was Dad. He believed ordinary people could build things together. Community wasn’t a slogan to him. It was something you practised. When he died in 2012, it left a space that can never be filled. But families have a way of carrying each other through grief, and my Uncle David stepped even further into a role he had occupied for much of my life.

My Uncle David — or, as we called him, Uncle Dad — was a raging socialist, and in one of our last conversations we discussed this very thing. He laughed when I told him I would reject an honour, and the fact it arrived almost six months to the day after he died isn’t lost on me. Somewhere he’s shaking his head and proud at the same time. We loved each other deeply.

Uncle Dad and me...

We’ve lost people before, as every family has. But grief feels different to me now. So does legacy. What matters, what remains, what we leave behind — none of it stays abstract for long once you reach a certain age. Perhaps that’s why the letter landed differently than it would have ten years ago. What I inherited wasn’t just a family; it was a way of being in the world.

Then there is charity. Before I ever led one, a charity helped me. Shelter helped us find housing when we needed it. My mum spent days in the housing office trying to secure somewhere safe for us to live. Until then, she spent nights making sure the rats didn’t get into my cot. There are stories upon stories I could share — but this isn’t a biography. Blimey.

Then there is the life I have made. Lee and I have been together long enough to build a family, a life and a shared understanding that sometimes needs very few words and sometimes requires rather a lot of words, some of them not to be repeated in public. Over three decades he has supported me through every promotion, every setback and every crisis of confidence. If I’ve spent my life pursuing purpose, Lee has often been the person quietly holding the centre.

Me and the old man - 33 years and counting...

Then there are Billi and Sascha, my kids, the most precious gift. The people who most reliably remind me not to take myself too seriously — you should see our family WhatsApp. Before I became a parent, I measured much of life through achievement. My children widened the lens. They taught me that a meaningful life is not the same thing as a successful career. BTW no photos because it takes days to go through their quality control and sign off - IYKYK.

So, whatever this honour means, it did not begin with me. It began with people who crossed oceans, opened their doors, made room for one more person at the table and taught me that community is something you build, protect and pass on. No honour belongs to one person. At least, I don’t think this one does.

When I think about this recognition, I think about the village that keeps me upright. My younger brothers, Alan and William, who have frankly been calling me “Commander” for years — well, someone has to keep them in line! They have been united with their wives Helen and Sarah, who have become my sisters and not forgetting my gorgeous nephews Alfie, Freddie and Persie - together we are a force. They think all this is hilarious.

These two...

I think about my friends — the people who have celebrated the wins, survived the disasters and occasionally talked me down from whatever fresh nonsense I was contemplating at the time, Nicola, Joanna, Danielle, Colleen. I think especially of my darling Antithai, who died in 2020 and whom I miss terribly. She was a life getter, and if she were here she would be organising a literal parade — she was joy personified.

I think about the people who have sponsored me, challenged me, encouraged me and occasionally rescued me from myself. There are too many to name, but I must acknowledge Stevie Spring CBE, whose wisdom has helped me navigate some of the hardest moments of my career. And my doctorate supervisor Lyndsey Nicholls, who showed me what I was capable of when I doubted myself.

And I think about whoever nominated me. Initially, I wasn’t too happy about it. Now I’m more grateful than I can properly express.

For years I thought I knew exactly what I’d do if this letter ever arrived. I was wrong. The discomfort hasn’t disappeared, and I understand why some people will disagree with my decision. The letters after my name will not resolve the contradictions of history or erase the colonial legacy embedded within the honour itself. But neither will those contradictions disappear if people like me step away from the conversation. Life rarely offers us perfect choices. Sometimes it simply asks what we intend to do next.

If anything, this decision has reminded me who I am. I’m still the granddaughter of migrants. Still the girl from North London who occasionally finds herself in rooms she never expected to enter. The only difference is that I’ve decided to accept this recognition and use whatever platform comes with it in the service of the cause.

My mother was told she’d amount to nothing when she got pregnant with me. She looked at the world and said, “Watch me.” 51 years later I’m borrowing that line with considerably more doubt than she had. But I’m borrowing it anyway.

Watch me.

My Mum still telling someone off...

Author's note: AI assisted with proofreading this piece. The content, reflections, and conclusions are my own, the bad jokes are all mine…