Britain, Remembered

Remembrance risks becomes a state ritual for an untrusted and despised establishment

SEBASTIAN MILBANK

November has arrived, and in Britain this means a ubiquitous tide of poppies, adorning press and politicians across the airwaves, as Remembrance Day marches gravely into view for another year. Even though the last veteran of the Great War died over a decade ago, and it will not be long before the last WWII veteran joins them, there has been no debate or proposal that the nature of commemoration changes. It can seem at times like Britain is a country out of history, its heritage fixed in place by law and sentiment, its civic rituals gliding on no matter the crisis and anger of day to day politics.

But that placid surface may be boiling over. In 2023, a famous image of worried and exasperated Royal British Legion poppy sellers surrounded by chanting Palestine protestors went viral. The staid rhythms of British statecraft had been disrupted by history still happening in the Middle East, as Israel violently retaliated in Gaza in response to the massacres of October 7. Protests surged, largely uncontrolled and lightly policed. It was reported that poppy sellers had been quietly withdrawn from public spaces across the country for fear of confrontations. The protestors, predominantly Muslims and left wing activists, might be inclined to see an organisation identified with the British army in a hostile light.

In the subsequent two years, the grooming gangs scandal, the riots in Southport over the mass killing of young white girls by a Rwandan teenager, and increasing tensions over “migrant hotels” housing illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense, have breached the fragile and heavily policed consensus of British politics. Almost one in five Britons is now non white, a number that is only set to grow. As the poppy sellers case demonstrates, this new, divided Britain is on a collision course with the assumptions embedded in Remembrance. Not only do many immigrant communities lack a strong sense of identification with the national story it tells, but for many angry natives on the nationalist right, it is perceived as a hollow ritual.

This changed political atmosphere is increasingly evident. In September a war memorial was vandalised with a St George’s Cross. Meanwhile in Canada, a new Remembrance Day stamp depicted a Sikh soldier, reflecting the way that efforts are being made to integrate ethnic minorities into remembrance. But many individuals on social media were attacking the move, arguing that “only 10” Sikhs served in the Canadian army during WWI. Yet Sikhs made up 20 per cent of the Indian army, with 130,000 fighting for the British Empire, and over 700,000 Sikhs now live in Canada. That imperial legacy is perhaps proving as complex and troubling for an ever more ethnonationalist populism as it has proved for the postcolonial left.

In one viral clip that summarised the nature of the discourse, a WWII veteran on Good Morning Britain declared that “the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result”, and that he fought for “freedom”, a freedom that is now being lost. The clip was widely shared by nationalist and anti-immigration accounts online. Remembrance is now culture war territory, its once peaceful halls filled with the ringing of rhetorical arms.

Neither Little Englanders nor borderless cosmopolitans have answers that fit the needs of the moment

Remembrance and its ceremonies are a remnant of the civil religion of a country that no longer exists. Post-war Britain was a nation at once deeply traditional and confidently modern. The same generation that watched as Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in a ceremony shamelessly replete in Tudor pageantry was embracing rapid technological change, rethinking how people lived and producing new culture. Despite the end of Empire, a sense of national confidence linked to rapid economic growth, cultural innovation, and wartime victory was evident. The sense of loss and solemnity around Remembrance was both sincere, and for many linked to a still strong national faith in the life to come. But this sense of purpose did not last, and soon became fiercely contested.

The unity born of wartime struggle and post-war consensus eroded and collapsed in the 70s and 80s. The way WWI was perceived changed. Satire, like the film Oh! What a Lovely War, portrayed the British establishment as implicated in the needless slaughter of its young. Though portraying the Edwardian age, it was really reflective of the changing attitudes of the 60s, as the anti-war and nuclear disarmament movements gained ground, with the film coming out in 1969, only a year after the protests of 1968.

Starting in the 1960s, as education in general became more “progressive”, WWI was starting to be taught as an “imperialist” war, and the combatants were redefined from heroes to victims. Wartime propaganda was effectively inverted, such that WWI served as a “never again” warning against nationalism and armed conflict. This mythmaking was further embedded in the national consciousness by popular culture, most famously in the ending of Blackadder, in which the satirical journey through British history culminates in the slaughter of the trenches. Subtly, WWI became a rubicon, a dam that pent up the churning ocean of Britain’s deep and complex history, leaving space for the cleaner story of the “good war” of WWII, and the new secular, modern, liberal and social democratic society that emerged in its wake.

Remembrance shifted covertly from being the civil religion of a unified (and largely patriotic and Christian) post-war society, to the civil religious ritual of an increasingly divided, secular, and liberal society. How do you get CND marching Labour voters and Belgrano-blasting Tories to sing from the same hymn sheet? What emerged is the curious synthesis of modern Remembrance. Its contradictions were all too apparent in a recent Remembrance day essay by Prince Harry, in which he called on readers to at once show “admiration and respect” for the military, yet also to reject the “glorification of war” and to “recognise its costs”. In short we are a country that reveres its military, but regards it as a criminal tragedy that it is ever deployed anywhere dangerous.

Remembrance serves a strange double purpose as both a classic bit of reactionary military pomp, yet also heartfelt pacifist propaganda about the horrors of war. And as Britain has become more diverse, this already overly broad tent has been further widened into a narrative of liberal democratic values and multicultural unity. Remembrance has come to feel part of a country that is not so much a managed democracy as it is a “stage-managed democracy” in which public spectacle is used to paper over growing divisions.

This employment of Remembrance was nowhere more obviously than in Wootton Bassett. During the War on Terror, the coffins of British war dead passing through the town from a nearby airbase led to a sombre ritual as the town honoured the dead. A heartfelt and patriotic gesture, it was the sort of thing that left uncontrolled might have built into real public rage against the conduct and basis of the war. But press and politicians largely colluded in casting a veil of apolitical Remembrance sobriety and sentimentality over the affair. In 2011, Cameron declared the town Royal Wootton Bassett — the subliminal message was that the British thing to do in the face of tragedy is nothing much at all, but do nothing with dignity and grace.

The changing political and ethnic landscape of Britain is making such dignified inaction increasingly untenable, and is calling into question the future and nature of common rituals like Remembrance. Poppy wearing is compulsory on the airwaves and the green benches, but amongst the young, only a third when polled say they will wear a poppy, as opposed to just over half of Gen X, and an overwhelming majority of Baby Boomers.

As older generations pass away, there is a real risk that Remembrance becomes a state ritual for an untrusted and despised establishment, as a majority of the country are indifferent or actively antagonistic towards it. At the heart of its crisis are the questions of the relationship of state and citizen, civilian and military, nation and empire.

The convenient forgetting of many aspects of our history, the ironic damming up and dilution of memory in Remembrance, has ceased to be convenient, and risks being actively corrosive. The split of the world wars into good and bad occurs because WWII can be better reimagined as a liberal democratic conflict. Yet the reality is that both were fought as wars in defence of the British Empire. The multicultural armies that fought across fronts divided by thousands of miles reflects not contemporary diversity, but rather the Edwardian ideal of a Commonwealth of nations under the stewardship of the British people.

Indeed, it was World War One, not Two, which was a “people’s war” in which millions eagerly volunteered, often with the conscious aim of winning expanded social freedoms or earning greater independence for their nations within the Empire. Whilst the result of the Great War was to massively expand the franchise and democratise British society, the results of WWII are more ambiguous. The huge social achievements of the post war era are unquestionable, but they came about through the extension of wartime central planning, creating a country that was more egalitarian, but arguably less free. Today, we are approaching Edwardian levels of inequality, but with a state that regularly intervenes in and manages individual lives.

In a further paradox, Britain has lost its post-imperial sense of nationhood, even as it has imported its former imperial subjects in unprecedented numbers. Our national story is dismissed as too exclusionary and our global story is regarded as an embarrassment. The liberal establishment seeks to define Britishness by liberal values that have no special connection to British nationhood, even as the extremes of the nationalist right drift towards a definition of Britishness based on ancestry rather than culture, language or faith.

Add to this the fact that Britain has the sixth highest defence budget in return for an army set to shrink to levels not seen since before the Napoleonic War — an army whose casualties are regarded, by elite consensus, not as triumphant heroes but as wasteful tragedies.

There is a desperate need to rebuild our relationship with state, army and imperial legacy on the basis of present circumstance and the longue durée of British history, rather than rooting our identity in a mythologised establishment account of the World Wars.

Remembrance needs to be more unapologetic about celebrating military heroism in the defence of shared ideals and culture, and reclaim itself as a popular devotion to a citizen army, rather than a ritual prescribed by politicians. Criticism of specific conflicts or wars of choice and aggression is always a reasonable position, but this must not detract from the central idea of a covenant between people and army that goes back to the most ancient roots of citizenship as public and military service.

This military-political covenant should also be a living link between present struggles and our deep past. Less emphasis should be put on the world wars, and more given to both recent conflicts and the defining fights of the past. The dwindling attention given to Trafalgar Day reflects a neglect of our pre-20th century history, and the central and vital role of the navy in securing British liberty, prosperity and defence. As I’ve written previously, this neglect has real costs — as we see in the shameful abandonment of our coastal communities and maritime industries.

Real Remembrance has to mean weaving a golden thread of gratitude and gift reaching from Alfred the Great all the way to the heroic actions of our own day, like those of Andrew Johnson, the military veteran and train driver whose calm and quick thinking saved lives during the recent Cambridgeshire train stabbing, and Samir Zitouni, an Algerian-born staff member and civilian, who put himself in front of passengers, and fought the knife attacker armed only with a saucepan grabbed from the galley, receiving life threatening wounds in the process.

That incident itself is a reminder of the terrible divides in British society created by globalisation, mass migration and political polarisation, but also of the power of acts of courage and solidarity. Overcoming these racial rifts and resisting the destruction of national culture will involve being able to confidently reclaim both our national and civilisational history. Neither Little Englanders nor borderless cosmopolitans have answers that fit the needs of the moment. Remembrance will have to engage with the role of Empire at more than the superficial level of contextless spin about diversity and inclusion. We should be honest about both the goods and ills of Empire, and realistic about divided opinions about its role and legacy. But reclaiming a sense of an English-speaking civilisation, of which Britain is the heart and cradle, must be the first step to navigating economic globalisation and the age of migration.

Remembrance is no longer a unifying story — but it can be again, if we have the courage to break with the dogma that has come to define it.

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This article (Britain, remembered) was created and published by The Critic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Sebastian Milbank

We remember the fallen – while foreign criminals mop up taxpayer cash

JANICE DAVIS

TODAY, the annual Remembrance Sunday commemoration is held in London to honour the contribution of service personnel and civilians in the two World Wars and successive conflicts. It is a sombre occasion: the military bands stirring, the uniforms and greatcoats immaculate, and the church bells muffled. The crimson poppy wreaths are laid, while thousands of marchers salute the Cenotaph.

It is a day of remembering, honouring and thanksgiving. It is also one of the country’s most important charity fund-raisers. Last year, the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal (RBL) raised £49.2million, and this year the target is £53.1million. These contributions support the Legion’s work, including financial support for ex-service personnel, advice about housing, employment and mental health, and care homes and recovery programmes.

But with the passing of time, this symbolism has become problematic. On the one hand, displays have become ever more elaborate and showy. In Skegness this year, the RBL branch organised a vast cascading display of more than 80,000 individual poppies, all handmade from all over the world – a ‘very humbling’ experience, according to Tracy Turner, branch vice-chair. Meanwhile some displays have been vandalised, including last year’s giant installation in Eastleigh, Hampshire, where poppies were ripped down from lampposts.

Prominent celebrities have refused to wear a poppy. Oxford historian Adam Gregory has written that as the survivor generation dies out – Harry Patch, the last surviving veteran of the First World War, died in 2009 – ‘ceremonies have become related in the public mind less to individual grief and more to national pride’.

Organisations have emerged which actively oppose the celebrations. One group, called Muslims Against Crusades, burned poppies during the two-minute silence on Armistice Day, chanting anti-British slogans, and one member was prosecuted for public order offences. Another veteran was allegedly assaulted in Edinburgh’s Waverley station while selling poppies during a pro-Palestinian rally. For young people especially, many find buying a poppy too close to nationalism, and see it as ‘similar to hanging a St George’s flag in the window of your sitting room’.

It is not only ‘far-right’ groups who are accused of appropriating the poppy. The ‘far left’, in the form of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), have subverted the practice through the selling of white poppies in the run-up to Remembrance Day as part of a campaign against the ‘glorification’ of war. Sales are especially buoyant in schools and universities, and among Muslim school students, with most people wearing them as a gesture of solidarity with Gaza.

Lord Dannatt, former head of the Army, disapproves of this ‘hijacking’ of Remembrance Day, while Bob Seely, former soldier and Tory MP, said: ‘Wearing a poppy has nothing to do with current conflicts in other parts of the world, or political affiliation in the UK.

‘Schools doing this are doing the wrong thing, and are missing the point and purpose of Remembrance weekend. Wearing a poppy is about remembering those who fought and died for this country. Left-wingers should not be politicising this event or hijacking it to peddle their own, very often confused, set of beliefs.’

So what actually is the point of the Poppy Appeal ?

According to the Rational Forum substack, Remembrance Day is a pause during which Britain remembers and honours those who served their country, in the mud of Flanders, the skies over the Ruhr, and the deserts of Iraq. But these days, service people return too often to a nation which seems to have forgotten ‘the covenant of care’. This is nothing less than a national scandal. Around 7,500 veterans are currently sleeping rough or in refuges, mainly supported by the charity of those who contribute to the RBL’s appeal.

Governments, both Tory and Labour, have been pouring billions into housing asylum seekers and illegal small-boat arrivals – people who have contributed nothing whatsoever to the nation. Meanwhile, more than 400 disused or surplus barracks lie fallow, according to the Ministry of Defence Land Holdings Bulletin 2025, including 300 former RAF stations, 80-90 Army barracks, 20-30 Navy or joint facilities, derelict airfields and camps in the Highlands, many contaminated with asbestos or unexploded ordnance.

This, claim the substack writers, is not mere mismanagement. It is a profound betrayal, ‘a national ingratitude dressed up as fiscal prudence and humanitarian necessity’. Sales of disused sites have generated over £1billion to date.

They go on to contrast the situation of asylum seekers and homeless veterans. As of June this year, 110,000 asylum seekers are housed in supported accommodation. The Home Office’s asylum contracts for 2019-2029 have ballooned to £15.3billion, with £5.5million daily spent on hotels. At the same time, veterans are allocated a mere £8-12million in total through Operation Fortitude and the Returning Veterans Homelessness Programme, which managed to rehouse a mere 400 by 2024, in spite of the 2023 pledge to end rough sleeping.

The scandal runs deeper than the costs alone. Housing an asylum seeker in a disused barracks costs an estimated £200-300 per night, not just for a bed, but security guards, three hot meals, on-site GP, welfare officers, transport, and legal safeguarding, all run by private contractors pocketing millions in profits.

For the homeless veteran, the budget is £20 per day to cover a shared flat, a weekly PTSD session, a benefits form filled in by a charity caseworker, no fences, no catering, and no ‘public confidence’ budget. In other words, a tenth of the taxpayers’ money that goes towards asylum seeker maintenance, which is even criticised as ‘prison-like’ by groups like MSM. So much for ‘Homes for Heroes’ and national pride. Until this situation changes, the Poppy Appeal represents almost all our veterans are entitled to.

How despicable and shabby that this shortfall has to be made up by the voluntary sector, while people are paying millions in taxation to fund asylum-seeking aliens. How totally uncaring and neglectful of our successive governments. This is why I have nothing but contempt for the faux-solemnity of all those dignitaries who show up at the Cenotaph every November, yet in their official capacities turn a callous blind eye to the shameful predicament of so many homeless veterans.

Along with the Rational Forum, I ask: ‘Will we persist in this parsimony while our veterans vanish into the margins? Or will the weight of witness, those 7,500 souls, finally compel a reckoning, forcing red and blue both to honour the oath they swore in poppy-pinned pieties, or confess the poppies were plastic all along?’

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This article (We remember the fallen – while foreign criminals mop up taxpayer cash) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Janice Davis