Lest We Forget - But Not Like That
How a symbol of remembrance became Britain’s most reliable outrage generator.
Welcome to Bearly Politics - an independent publication about power, politics and the fine art of collective overreaction. I’m The Bear - a healthcare strategist by trade, a writer by accident and an occasional wielder of sarcasm in the public interest.
It is October. I am personally not 100% sure how this happened, but the year is now rapidly moving towards closing down - wasn’t it literally just June? I’m sure I can remember sitting in a friends’ garden having a glass of white wine in blazing sunshine just the other day?!
This part of October means a few things to me - it’s almost time change (which breaks my head completely), the Big Sainsbury’s is probably already unpacking all their Christmas decorations to thrust into my eyes the next time I walk in for the big shop and, having a look at the outrage calendar, it will also soon be time for Poppy Rage Season1.
Full disclosure, I am writing this as someone who is sort of an outsider to this country2, this really is one of the odder bits of the culture wars.
I get the remembrance part of it, I really do. What I don’t get is the rage attached to if you don’t remembrance in the right way.
Because that’s kind of what this has become, isn’t it? Not really about remembrance, but the performance of remembrance. It feels like clockwork, this particular culture war - the red flower starts to sprout on lapels, breakfast TV sofas, the front pages of tabloids and sometimes even on someone’s Vauxhall Astra, all of this accompanied by the now familiar moral panic about someone, somewhere daring to not have one.
A presenter forgets to pin theirs on just right? Traitor.
Footballer wears a white poppy instead? Cowardly wokey.
Someone simply… doesn’t wear one? Call Shabana Mahmood for an instant deportation.
We are now at the point that somewhere between “Lest We Forget” and “Let’s All Pretend to Be Churchill”, Remembrance Day turned into type of compulsory group project where the marking rubric is entirely emotional and set by the Daily Mail comments section.
So, as a rare act of preparation to pre-empt this year’s episode of poppy induced hysteria, I thought I would do a little FAQ.
“Why do you hate the poppy? Don’t you respect the people who died for your freedom?”
This is the opening gambit - the “gotcha” that really, really isn’t.
I don’t, in fact, hate the poppy, and I don’t think anyone who hesitates to wear one, or who might wear a different one, do either. What many of us however do dislike is what the poppy has been mutated into - a pin as purity test.
The poppy is, above all, meant to symbolise remembrance - not obedience. Its purpose right from the very beginning was to mark the horror and futility of war, a reminder of the scale of loss that goes hand in hand with nations having a go at each other. It was never meant to be a badge or measure of moral correctness. Over the years though, the symbolism of the poppy has been commandeered, not by veterans or their families, but by outrage merchants, opportunistic politicians and obsequious opportunists who came to the realisation that policing patriotism pays far better than actually just practicing it.
A poppy pinned perfectly on your lapel does not make you a better citizen any more than not wearing one (or wearing one that’s not red) makes you an ungrateful one. The men who died in the trenches in WWI definitely didn’t do so to give future generations the opportunity to shout “WHERE’S YOUR POPPY!?” at strangers on social media like it’s a national sport.
It’s in no way disrespectful to opt out, and neither is it unpatriotic to prefer quiet remembrance to a public display. What is actually disrespectful is reducing remembrance to an annual rage fest and ritualised social media meltdowns.
“If you don’t wear a poppy, you’re ungrateful - why can’t you just show respect like everyone else?”
The argument here rests on the concept that respect is something that you perform instead of something that you feel.
It is not.
Forced gratitude is nothing more than theatre, not respect.
The poppy was never meant to be a mandatory accessory that’s codified into law, requiring each person in the UK to pin one on on 2 November3, and even the British Royal Legion says exactly this every year. The “everyone else doing it” argument here turns remembrance into a national dress code. Always keep in mind that as soon as something like this becomes mandatory, it stops actually being meaningful.
If remembrance actually meant what it’s supposed to mean, we would be spending much less time policing someone’s lapel and far more time thinking about the horror of sending young men and women to die for the mistakes and hubris of old men.
“It’s Just a Flower - Why Make it Political?”
The problem here is that the poppy stopped being “just a flower” the second that people started losing jobs, airtime or safety over it. It was politicised when producers cropped presenters out of shot for not wearing one. It was politicised when the right-wing press turned it into a tribal marker - a sort of badge of the “real” Brit - and turning remembrance into yet another culture war battlefield.
It wasn’t the critics of the poppy who politicised it - it was the people who consciously weaponised it. The ones who decided that wearing one proved moral worth and that anyone without one must secretly hate the United Kingdom.
The message of the poppy - “never again” - is now being replaced by “never question” and it’s turned a symbol of grief into yet another loyalty test.
It has come to the point that, if anything, remembering the dead honestly without turning them into a marketing campaign for nationalism is the actual respectful thing to do.
“The Left is Trying to Erase British History!”
What is actually meant when someone shouts this out is “stop reminding us of the bits of history that make us uncomfortable!”
I regret to inform you, but being nominally on the left does not, in fact, give me or anyone else the power to “erase history.” The ability it does give is challenging the national habit of cropping history - keeping all the lovely sepia parts with bugles and poppies while conveniently discarding the rest.
Remembrance, if we’re truly acting in the spirit of how it is intended, includes paying our respect to everyone.
Everyone that includes the colonial troops who fought and died without recognition, the nurses and stretcher bearers, the labourers who built the war-machine but never got the medals, the LGBTQ+ soldiers who died for a country that made them criminals for loving the wrong sex, the animals sacrificed to the god of war, the civilians bombed in countries that we barely name.
Widening the lens to include these (and many other people) is honesty, not erasure.
The people who tend to shout loudest about “British History” usually mean “British heroism”, and those just aren’t the same thing. History is, by its very nature, complex, full of courage and cruelty in equal measure, and when you only honour the glory and skip the grief, your mythologising, not remembering.
If remembrance is to mean anything, it must include everyone who paid the price - not just those who fit a narrow idea of what we consider heroism.
“Poppies unite us - stop being so divisive!”
That’s the line - isn’t it?
The idea that if everyone just did as they were told and pinned the same flower to their chest and kept their mouths shut, we’d all magically feel united. It’s a terribly lovely thought this - and it’s also completely false.
I’m sorry to break it to everyone, but unity is not built through uniformity - true unity comes from a shared set of values, not matching accessories. The poppy certainly could be unifying - if it wasn’t constantly weaponised as a test of who loves Britain the “right” way, but every time a poppy is used to shame, exclude or silence someone, it stops being a symbol of remembrance and becomes a symbol of conformity.
The irony, of course, is that the people who are most loudly demanding so-called “unity” are generally the ones who thrive on division as a business model. These people are not looking for solidarity, they’re looking for silence, they want a country where everyone looks, thinks and acts the same and never, god-forbid, asks awkward questions about what - and importantly who - we choose to remember.
The best way for remembrance, and thereby the poppy, to unite is for it to make room for all of our stories - and not just the palatable ones.
“You’re disrespecting veterans.”
This particular one gets trotted out quite a bit, and done so usually by an X account with an egg as a profile picture named “TRUEPATRIOT964786” - which should make you question it just a bit in terms of relevance.
The problem with this is that many veterans themselves have said they’re uncomfortable with how remembrance has been hijacked. The Royal Legion has even taken to politely asking the public to please stop poppy policing and to remember that the poppy is a personal choice, not a political statement.
Wearing a poppy is still a very personal choice, reflecting individual experiences and personal memories. It is never compulsory but is greatly appreciated by those who it is intended to support - British Royal Legion
It’s actually quite hard to imagine something more disrespectful to the fallen than turning their sacrifice into some sort of purity contest. Veterans, by and large, fought for freedom of thought, they certainly did not fight for forced symbolism.
If anything, defending the right not to wear one honours their sacrifice more honestly than the faux outrage we’ll be seeing over the next few weeks ever will.
“So what does real remembrance look like?”
To me true remembrance looks a bit quieter than what we’ve been led to believe - less about which badge you wear and the broadcast segments we see on the issue, and more about taking five minutes to actually have a think about what “never again” actually means - and then questioning whether we’re living up to it.
Real remembrance isn’t loud - in fact, a big part of remembrance day is a moment of silence, which should be the biggest clue. It doesn’t demand applause or an enforced conformity. It’s reflective, and it holds space for all the people we’ve forgotten, all the lessons we seem to keep unlearning and all the names that never made it onto the Cenotaph.
It looks like giving acknowledgement to the fact that war doesn’t just end when the guns stop - that its echoes run through trauma, displacement and grief that will spread through generations to come. It means giving recognition that remembrance can coexist with criticism, that loving your country doesn’t mean you refuse to acknowledge what it gets wrong and that “respect” doesn’t need a self-appointed policeman to exist.
A reclamation of remembrance is needed - it needs to be taken back from those among us who would shout loudest about it in an attempt to create the division that makes up a part of the things we really should never forget. Remembrance should belong to everyone - and each of us should be free to mark it in our own way.
To end with - I will be wearing a poppy this year. I’ll be wearing it specifically in remembrance of my LGBTQ+ friends who served in Helmand and who came back broken men and women. I’ll be wearing it in remembrance of the LGBTQ+ people who came before me - the queer soldiers, nurses and volunteers who gave everything for a country that didn’t yet see them as equal and who fought for freedoms that they were still denied in life.
This year, I’ll be wearing the British Royal Legion’s official LGBTQ+ poppy pin - and anyone who wants to join me, can find one here.
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For non-UK Readers: the poppy is a small paper or metal pin flower worn in early November to commemorate the military dead from the World Wars - sort of like your memorial day, but with significantly more moral panic attached to it over the past two decades or so.
And therefore more than likely one of those people that Katie Lam referred to as being “not entirely culturally coherent” and “will need to go home”
Because, and I cannot stress this enough, that would be weird.
For me, it's less about "less we forget" and more about "because we have forgotten" and "never again" is a load of bollocks, it never stopped.😥
Yet again, Bear, you say exactly what I am thinking ...! and have done for a few years now. It was one of the first examples, I think, of a symbol being appropriated by a group to which I don't subscribe to represent their specific views - thus making me resentful of the whole poppy 'thing'. Looking forward to any response I get to my 'share' of the article on Facebook ...