Was I the only one who noticed an absence of poppies this Remembrance weekend?

The asinine objection that it’s warmongering and jingoistic to pay our respects to the fallen is spreading its noxious tendrils

Last week I caught a mid-morning train from Cambridge to London and noticed something odd. I was the only person in the carriage wearing a remembrance poppy on my lapel.
I began to doubt the date and thought I must be experiencing a serious level of menopausal fog. But once in London the story was the same: there was no sign of honouring the fallen on Oxford Street. It wasn’t until I reached Vauxhall tube where an engaging group of young, black army cadets were selling poppies that I noted any enthusiasm. What makes this even more heartbreaking is the certain knowledge that on our Capital’s streets former servicemen are living rough, suffering from PTSD – I’ve talked to enough of them over the years.
So why do so few now honour the sacrifice of countless young men, not to mention brave women like the heroines of SOE? It’s not as if we don’t drum the horrors of armed conflict into our schoolchildren. Both world wars are enshrined in the history curriculum, schools schedule trips to the vast Commonwealth graves at Thiepval, few study English literature without analysing the soul-piercing poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
Many will be aware that the symbolic act of wearing a poppy comes from John McCrae’s poem In Flanders fields the poppies blow, written in memory of a friend who died at Ypres. Even now the war in Ukraine reminds us that there’s never a time in global history when those capable of fighting aren’t being called on to risk everything.
And yet the asinine objection that it’s warmongering and jingoistic to wear a poppy, or symbolic of Empire’s oppressions, somehow spreads its noxious tendrils. You can have marched, as I did, under the old hippie banner of “make love not war” against the Iraq War (this week’s news that Iraqi legislators have proposed laws restricting basic rights to women and sanctioning girls as young as nine to marry doesn’t make me feel misguided), yet still acknowledge millions gave their lives so that future generations could be peaceniks.
Often wildly self-indulgent ones: we take our ability to protest military action for granted, but barely begin to acknowledge our armed forces’ role as peacekeepers and upholders of democracy. Let alone the trauma they have sustained in countries like Afghanistan, trying to stave off the Taliban doing what their democratically-elected government asked of them.
These human lions gave their lives so any sportsman playing for a British team – Wrexham’s Irish player Jamie McClean, last weekend – can exercise their democratic right to stand apart from the club’s other members as they observe the Remembrance Day silence. Despite McClean’s declaration that “the poppy is forced now on everyone in the UK and god forbid someone doesn’t wear it”, that’s visibly not the case. Fields of red have wilted to window boxes over my lifetime precisely because there’s no strong-arming into obeisance here. Nor would many wish that. But apathy needs stemming from the top.
Is it too much to desire that Keir Starmer and his Cabinet as passionately defend the Royal British Legion as the cadets I saw at Vauxhall? That they vociferously explain every penny raised goes to supporting former servicemen and women? There’s no need to shame refuseniks when they could simply wield the headteacher’s adage: “I’m not angry, so much as disappointed.”