Lest We Remember

People who saw the Beatles live may laugh or moan about being expected to listen to Vera Lynn while eating spam fritters under the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, but they know what the political basis of their sweeties is, and so will we. It is when they start pretending out loud to have been Blitzed that they become tiresome. We are never going to be able to get away with that one.

25 or 30 years ago, it was universally assumed that only the Armed Forces themselves would still be keeping Remembrance Sunday by now. It was about the two World Wars, and the veterans of those were starting to die out in some numbers by then. No one expected that it would still be a grand national event when someone who had been born on the last day of the Second World War was 77, and when every veteran of the First World War was dead. 

But in the meantime, it has transformed into the exact opposite of its original intention. It has become a recruitment opportunity for the Forces, a celebration of recent and ongoing wars, a rally in support of future ones, and a way of cementing the idea that some kind of debt from the War was owed in perpetuity to the old or the ageing, even though most of those who were now drawing the state pension, which has always been a benefit and never a contributory scheme, had not been born in 1945. 

Meanwhile, what has always been this country's shameful treatment of veterans continues as ever. They are dying because of benefit sanctions, they are sleeping on the streets because of the crisis in the mental health system, and so on. I am wearing a poppy as I type this. But I have never sent anyone to war and then expected private charity to look after them once they had come back. The Royal British Legion ought to be a purely social organisation. It did not send people to war, and neither it nor the astounding array of other military charities ought to be responsible for the care of veterans. Morally, that responsibility lies with the State.