Remembrance Sunday is not a Culture War. It’s about Never Again
In recent times Remembrance Sunday has been extended to include a range of imperial wars Britain has started or fought in. Certainly the working class soldiers who signed up because there were no other jobs deserve to be remembered.
However in also in recent times Remembrance Sunday seems to have been extended over weeks and become part of a Culture War. In 2026 this seems to have focused on far right and fascist types claiming that Wetherspoons have banned poppies. They have not of course.As every year they are available on the bar in every Spoons pub.
I often have worn a poppy on the Sunday (reasons below) and this year I got one from of course Wetherspoons. Its not about silly Tory games, it’s about fascism, a matter of life and death to numbers. I take that seriously and always have done. The Tory poppy obsessives don’t.
The below dates from a few years ago now but remains relevant.
I’m no fan of wars (although not a pacifist) but there are reasons to remember those that have taken place (and those that still are). Not the politicians and generals who order them and promote them but the ‘poor bloody infantry’ who have to fight them. Sometimes there is a good reason for the fight and a good reason to remember it
Simon Jenkins* no doubt has a point about an obsession with the second world war and Nazis to the exclusion of other history – that of colonialism and imperial wars for example. It is hardly time, though, to forget all about the second world war. My late father fought at Monte Cassino in 1944 and saw some of his comrades die there. A lifelong socialist, he would invariably wear a poppy on Remembrance Sunday. He wasn’t interested in Tory flag-waving. His concern, as when he was to be found on Anti-Nazi League protests in his later years, was to make sure that the industrial scale of murder represented by the Holocaust was both never forgotten and never repeated.
Keith Flett
Guardian 10th November 2017
*Simon Jenkins piece
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