Earlier this month my 10-year-old son was asked by his teacher to remove his white poppy and replace it with a red one. A small playground incident and one that he wanted no fuss made over but as his mother and someone who respects the fact that men and women paid the ultimate sacrifice of their lives to preserve the rest of us, I object. We live in a time when more civilians die during conflicts than military personnel. Who remembers them? Where are the monuments to the ordinary citizens who have perished alongside the soldiers whom we honour in an annual exhibition of ritualistic mourning and a sea of red? My son’s great-great-grandfather was a conscientious objector during WW1. His family suffered hugely for his principles and ultimately, he became one of the fallen when he received a horrific head injury inflicted by someone who objected to his objections to not go to war and who hit him over the head with a pickaxe. He ended his days in a psychiatric ward, unaware of whether his protests had done any good. He would be horrified to know now that we are still engaged in bloody battles such as in Iraq, where we have regrettably lost over 100 British soldiers and stopped counting the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died, never mind the Britons who have lost their lives in related terrorist attacks. He would also sadly understand the anger that principles engender in others. The wearing of a white poppy on Remembrance Day was introduced by the Women’s Cooperative Guild in the early 1930s. These women wanted to acknowledge their love for their dead but also to say, ‘enough is enough’. The red poppy and Remembrance Day signify support for the British service personnel who have given their lives over many decades in many different wars, while white poppies remember and honour all those whose lives have been lost – civilians and soldiers – and are a reminder that war is not an effective solution to dispute. National commemoration in an age of individualism and social alienation is a greasy pole. remembrance Day may once have been an instinctive and genuine display of respect to honour the fallen, the two-minute silence observed without question, but we live in different and more difficult times that ironically, have seen a war break out over what has been dubbed ‘poppy fascism’. This year, against the backdrop of Iraq and associated acts of homeland terrorism, the commemorations felt particularly uncomfortable. and yet amidst all this, Gordon Brown has misjudged a national mood and has mooted turning remembrance Sunday into some form of Britishness day, celebrating military veterans as the embodiment of national identity. This is a Prime Minister who was at the heart of a Government that sent us into an illegal war in Iraq and one that has been blamed for negligence in allowing Rose Gentle’s 19-year-old soldier son, Gordon, to die there for lack of simple protection. Brown might be better advised to find solutions to war and our selective involvement in wholly unjust conflicts, while ignoring events of genocide in places like Rwanda, than in trying to organise a national consciousness. in wearing a poppy of any hue, we should be remembering everyone who has been delivered to a permanent silence and remind politicians that they have a responsibility to lead us away from war not towards it. So, if my son wants to wear a white poppy then he should, for his generation might, at last, learn the lessons of the past.

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