Well done, rightwing culture warriors! I’ve worn a poppy with pride every year since I was a choirboy, singing around Solihull war memorial on Remembrance Sunday in the suede denim 1970s, where the solemnity of the situation and the stark beauty of the Last Post momentarily softened even the talented young choirmaster’s yearnings. But I won’t wear a poppy this year.
Don’t get me wrong. I still put a few quid in the poppy collection box at my local Sainsbury’s, just now when I was buying some cat excrement bags. But on Monday on LBC, the increasingly befuddled wasps’ nest whacker Nick Ferrari spent an hour extrapolating an imaginary scenario where Keir Starmer didn’t wear a poppy in order to avoid offending imaginary Muslims. (Ironically, the same cynical Starmer deliberately ate Indian food in public during lockdown to try to ingratiate himself with our ethnic minorities, only to lose all the support this gained him by shillyshallying about a ceasefire, his naans nibbled for nothing.)
People like the GB News character and doorstep swing-voter-faking liar MP Lee Anderson have changed the poppy’s meaning somehow, making it a badge of allegiance to a whole raft of values I don’t necessarily subscribe to, damning as beneath contempt anyone who, even inadvertently, neglects to wear the red flower. So this year I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the once straightforward symbol of sacrifice pinned to my cagoule. A mystically inclined musical acquaintance once sent me prospective album cover art with which he hoped to reclaim the ancient good luck symbol of the swastika from the Nazis. I suggested it wasn’t a hill worth dying on. Symbols change their meaning with usage. There’s not much you can do about it.
I’m a man of a certain age and size. An XL Fred Perry shirt fits me, physically and culturally. It’s as stylish as I can get without feeling stifled, it locates me temporally in the 2 Tone/post-punk era that shaped me as an impressionable teenager and it’s smart enough to sport on stage but casual enough for me to wear around the house in just my pants. My clothes rail has a dozen identical Fred Perrys and I especially used to favour the black ones with yellow trim. But apparently, according to a pink-haired hipster girl in the merch queue at one of my Leicester Square theatre shows five years back, this has now been adopted as a covert uniform by the far right in Europe and the US. So I quickly took six neo-Nazi black and yellow Fred Perry shirts to the local People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals charity shop, where hopefully they were snapped up by a delighted cat-loving north London racist.
Similarly, last week the usual culture war suspects were trying to imprint the phrase “hate march” on to something that most reasonable people agree probably isn’t such a thing, even though pockets of it will undoubtedly be motivated by hate and be marching. I have to file this on Wednesday night, so there’s time to legally query all my unsubstantiated statements, or jokes as they were once known before wokery went woke. But by the time you read this, you’ll know if Saturday’s peace march turned bad. I don’t know. I didn’t go.
As it happens, even though in my woke mind I would have viewed the march as neither pro-Palestine nor anti-Israel, but simply as pro-ceasefire, I couldn’t have attended even if I had decided to, because I had already been booked to introduce a documentary film about experimental American jazz of the 60s and 70s at the London jazz festival. Peace march or jazz film? Hobson’s choice for the woke north London pseudointellectual. Nonetheless, Shitty Sunak promised to hold Metropolitan police commissioner Mark Rowley to account for any trouble, but was happy to sit alongside home secretary Suella Braverman at during the debate on the king’s speech on Wednesday, as she refused to withdraw her “hate march” assertions.
A bonfire is smoldering. Braverman and columnists and commentators such as Sarah Vine at the Daily Mail and the fascism-downplayer Douglas Murray at the Spectator (“I don’t see why no one should be allowed to love their country because the Germans mucked up twice in a century”) have thrown petrol on to it, deliberately striving to make the desire to honour the war dead of the past incompatible with the desire to prevent further war death in the present. The British Transport Police, meanwhile, have dismissed the Daily Mail’s claims that a poppy seller, seen sporting at least two different regimental berets, was set upon by pro-Palestine demonstrators at Waverley Station, but the inflammatory story did its job. And yet the person Sunak is going to hold to account if the bonfire combusts is the Met’s Mark Rowley, the fireman charged with keeping it under control. It’s insane, and Sunak is weak, afraid of the unappeasable maw of the Tory far right that has gobbled up every PM since the impossible Brexit empowered it, the heated-swimming-pool, credit-card twat.
But I still want to remember the war dead somewhere on Sunday. The grandfather who raised me was an airfield engineer on Lancasters in the RAF, his Cadbury factory skills repurposed from Bournville to bombers. A working-class white man of a particular generation, he hated the Germans of the past and the migrants of the present in equal measure. But I never saw him so distressed as when describing flying over Dresden after the 1945 firebombing and saying that what we had done to those people was utterly wrong. I know he would have supported a ceasefire.
So, frozen by Remembrance Sunday’s calcification into yet another theatre of the culture war, where do I go to grieve? Last year, I attended a sensitive ceremony in my local cemetery where, alongside the Last Post, folk choirs performed a varied selection of musical responses to conflict, including a song by anarcho-punk chart-toppers Chumbawamba. It was a beautiful thing. Hopefully, I’m there again as you read this, and when I wear the poppy there, I know it won’t be repurposed. And, should a gust of wind momentarily displace it, I won’t be swallowed whole by Nick Ferrari.
• This article was amended on 15 November 2023. An earlier version said that Rishi Sunak sat next to Suella Braverman at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday; in fact this was during the king’s speech debate.
Basic Lee tour dates are here; a six-week London run begins 9 December at Leicester Square theatre
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
