At the start of last week, I was thinking my regular Remembrance season thoughts – Are people wearing poppies earlier every year? – and by the middle of the week, I’d agreed to have a quick morning argument about poppies on the radio. David Lammy had been caught in parliament without one, and roundly castigated. He had responded with sentiments to the effect that Remembrance Sunday was the most important day of the year; nobody found it more important than him; anyone who didn’t think it was important was not a patriot; and by sheer hideous happenstance, he had a new suit, and his poppy was on the other suit. Some of us were thus called on to adjudicate on remembrance, while the more agile wing of the commentariat was wondering how Lam…
At the start of last week, I was thinking my regular Remembrance season thoughts – Are people wearing poppies earlier every year? – and by the middle of the week, I’d agreed to have a quick morning argument about poppies on the radio. David Lammy had been caught in parliament without one, and roundly castigated. He had responded with sentiments to the effect that Remembrance Sunday was the most important day of the year; nobody found it more important than him; anyone who didn’t think it was important was not a patriot; and by sheer hideous happenstance, he had a new suit, and his poppy was on the other suit. Some of us were thus called on to adjudicate on remembrance, while the more agile wing of the commentariat was wondering how Lammy could afford a new suit.
Anyway, my line hasn’t changed on this for at least 25 years. Wear a poppy, don’t wear a poppy, both are legitimate positions. Honouring the fallen is worthwhile. Finding all that performative honour a bit militaristic, and declining to have your love of country elided with celebration of war, even in a tinged-with-sorrow way, also worthwhile. You do you.
The world around me has changed immeasurably in that time, however, and what was once a sidebar to the national debate is now a matter of rigid consensus. If you were a public figure seen not wearing a poppy, you would probably be proscribed as a terrorist organisation; in the best-case scenario, people would think you were simply incapable of any memory, maybe you had just come out of a coma. And this all seems a little extreme.
It surprised me, when I heard the counter-argument to mine – from Simon Weston, Falklands veteran – that it was basically exactly the same. If people didn’t want to wear a poppy, fine, he said (I precis), just don’t go on and on about it.
Anyway, Sunday came, I was bombing along the Thames on my bike, and I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t allowed to cycle round Parliament Square, nor why all the crash barriers were down across Westminster Bridge. It wasn’t until I noticed a large number of people wearing medals that I clocked it; I’d spent so long arguing about poppies that I’d forgotten it was Remembrance Sunday. Obviously, I can’t speak for everyone; plenty of people did remember. But poppy-mania is all about the scrap, now, and actively blocks the one useful memory: choose harmony.