A Political Act

And that is why we should do it. The First World War was the wrong way of fighting for the principles set out in this article, and in fact it did enormous damage to the society defined by those principles, a society which had already begun to develop the Welfare State and to recognise workers' rights. But those principles were what was being fought for.

Oh, and while wearing the poppy might still be controversial in Nationalist areas of Northern Ireland (is it? really?), it no longer is in the Republic, where independence could only have been proclaimed in 1916 because so many men were away fighting for Union and Empire as the Southern Irish Catholics had been doing with distinction for a very long time, and which, as the Free State, provided more volunteers than unconscripted Northern Ireland did between 1939 and 1945. For the second week and the umpteenth year in a row, the poppy will be worn in front of 10 million or more viewers tonight both by Louis Walsh and by a customary Irish contestant.

Keep all of that in mind as you read the words of Andrew Frayn:

The England football strip controversy is a timely reminder of the enduring legacy of the first world war. There are now no known combatant survivors of the conflict: above all, it is now a symbol for the futility of war. Our general memory of the conflict is based on vaguely remembered history lessons, Alan Clark's The Donkeys, and literature classes on Wilfred Owen – who was barely published before his death, and hardly read at all until the 1930s. The most important influence on this current version of the war is a TV series: the sixth episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, which ends with a fade to an image of poppy fields.

Only this distant, mythologised version of the war could lead to the incredible claims made by public figures in politics and sport this week. Hugh Robertson, the minister for sport, said that "it is not religious or political in any way. Wearing a poppy is a display of national pride, just like wearing your country's football shirt." David Cameron claimed that "the idea that wearing a poppy to remember those who have given their lives for our freedom is a political act is absurd. Wearing a poppy is an act of huge respect and national pride."

Prince William, the president of the Football Association, proclaimed that "the poppy is a universal symbol of remembrance". He might have been disabused of this notion if the prime minister had been able to recall the controversy he caused this time last year in China, where the poppy is a painful reminder of European victories in the opium wars. Vice-president of Fifa Jim Boyce joined in, endorsing the "special request from a member of Fifa [which] is not of a political nature".

Boyce is from Northern Ireland, and David Horspool, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, used the example of that country to offer an acute summary of the absurdity of these comments: "You only have to go to Northern Ireland to see that wearing a poppy is a deeply political act, one which will be met with approval in the Shankill Road and which is inadvisable, to put it mildly, in the Falls Road." Perhaps the minister for sport would like to take a stroll there in the never-to-be-worn kit created by Umbro. National commemorations are necessarily political: the world wars were crucial in shaping and reshaping national boundaries throughout Europe, and wars throughout history have been fought to impose the will of the victor on the vanquished, and to take control of disputed and fought-over territories.

Many of those who fought in the first world war would be hard-pressed to recognise our narrative of its events. Although people went to war for all sorts of reasons – social pressure, schoolboyish fantasies, compulsion, and even for the money – a large number enlisted to defend the values for which they believed their country stood.

Those were the values of a still strongly religious society, the values famously espoused by the public schools and adopted and adapted by the growing state education system. Those values were based on a respect for hierarchies which was founded on religion: the house system in the public schools promoted obedience to authority by instilling collective loyalties. They were affiliations to ever greater powers, in a chain of command rising through form, house, school, and then monarch. The monarch represented the army, the nation, and also the church: God was the ultimate authority. A religious education in a pious society was the shared background of a majority of troops, even if they had ceased to believe in its consolations.

In our mostly secular society it is hard to believe that the disenchantment – to use the title of former Guardian writer CE Montague's 1922 book – which followed the war could have been preceded by such strongly felt "enchantments". However, it is the very strength of these beliefs before the first world war and in the early part of it that leads to the disenchantments of the subsequent decade.

Fifa's original decision was eventually overturned. The poppy has been moved from the strip, signifying national identity, to the black armband, signifying mourning. Mourning is itself political, and the Armistice Day ceremony retains both political and religious resonances. It commemorates those who fought to ensure that the government of Great Britain retained its power, and the main feature is the two minutes' silence. That silence is not just an empty, respectful silence, but an act of public memory which invokes religious principles of silent prayer, a space for active reflection.

However, even that might be a misconception. Armistice Day was not always wholly about mourning, reflection and contemplation. In his history of Armistice Day, the respected historian Adrian Gregory observes that the silence was a late addition to the 1919 ceremony, and that the British Legion petitioned for the day to be a holiday, only for that positive commemoration to be denied by the creeping hold of funereal remembrance. Alternative, boisterous celebrations were criticised as unofficial and dissenting – even if many of those who wanted to remember the war in that way were those who had worked hard to win it. Even as late as 1925, the Guardian reported that "in London there has been projected an enormous fancy dress ball for the evening of Armistice Day, and festal dinners are usually organised for that night in all the places where it is most fashionable to eat and drink in public." The article even-handedly assesses both the potential offence to the bereaved and the fact that the original Armistice Day was "one of the happiest days that most of us have ever known".

The first world war was not simply about fighting for a vague notion of freedom. Combatants fought to retain their national identity – a political act, even if not all of them understood it as such. The values they wanted to defend were based on religion. To strip those factors from the remembrance of the first world war is more absurd than any organisation's well-intentioned regulations which seek to maintain neutrality.