Lest We Remember

Remembrance Sunday used to be about the two World Wars. No one expected that it would still be a big thing when someone who had been born on the last day of the Second World War was 80. But in this century, it has been perverted into the exact opposite of its original intention. It has become a recruitment opportunity for the Armed 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. 

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. No doubt David Cameron will be there today. As Prime Minister, he once stated publicly that looking after veterans was not the job of the State, since that was what the Royal British Legion was for. Yet the 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 aftercare. Morally, that responsibility lies with the State.

In any case, charity does not seem to be doing much of a job of it. Instead, it sits on reserves of half a billion pounds while veterans starve, and it lobbies for the pro-war foreign policy line and for the arms industry, with which it has a scandalously cosy relationship. The arms companies even sponsor the Invictus Games. Give that a moment to sink in. The red poppy is now as much of a political statement as the white poppy, and a rather larger source of revenue for political campaigning. Until quite recently, all red poppies were the same size, and you wore one at a time. Like the proliferation of poppy kitsch, and like the habit of displaying it all year, that there is now some kind of competition bespeaks the whole thing's degeneration into decadence.

Yet the red poppy was initially, and it is still properly, anything but a glorification of war. The white poppy's message to "remember all victims of war" is already included, and the red poppy no longer features the name of Haig. White poppy money goes to the Peace Pledge Union, a campaigning organisation for absolute pacifism, a cause to which I do not subscribe, rather than to a charity of any kind.

But why do I still bother with the red poppy, and with Remembrance Sunday events? In front of me are my late father's medals: the 1939-1945 Star, the Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, the Italy Star, the France and Germany Star, and the War Medal 1939–1945. He had a life story that nobody could have written. And that is why, although people suggest it to me, I never shall. The maximum possible number of Stars from the War was six, but by my reckoning it would have been impossible to have served in all the necessary theatres. So, and I mean this out of sheer interest, does anyone know of someone with five? Well-rewarded war criminals and amoral arms salesmen do not own Remembrance. We must not let them steal it. It belongs to us.