Last year, I approached the captain of the Labour Parliamentary Staff Football Team and asked them whether they’d be willing to play my mates in a friendly match down at our regular pitch in Eltham. They said yes and we arranged a fixture for early in November.
The match was clearly a Sunday League-level friendly. Our ‘warm-ups’ consisted of shuffling around, making chit chat, and occasionally spanking a football 10 feet over the crossbar. Lots of lads were not wearing matching kits and one team was pulling straws over who would play in goal. Nevertheless, our referee took things seriously.
The referee had come up from North Kent for the game. 6ft foot plus with a polished bald head and a spotless kit; he wore wrap-around sports goggles and he meant business. He made it very clear that we would be holding a two minutes silence before the match for Armistice Day (it was in fact Remembrance Sunday). As we gathered around the semi-circle, he piped up and told us that this day was important to him because, well, “he was all for the red poppy and that”.
The whistle was blown and I stared right down at my feet. I told myself that I absolutely could not look up. Otherwise, I’d catch a mate’s eye and piss myself laughing. As we jogged to our starting positions, a few of us exchanged our thoughts on what just went on — “Who is this guy? Where does he think he is, Wembley?
The result of the match has faded into obscurity but the referee and his speech has not. The referee has become an ironic hero for a few of us, an everyman King. Sure, the referee might not have been a wordsmith, but his garbled speech only heightened the absurdity of the spectacle. He didn’t really know why we were standing there and neither did we.
I follow the Twitter accounts PoppyWatch and Mascots Minutes Silence as they routinely give me a chuckle. Both accounts highlight how the sombre, reflective and personal act of remembrance has become an absurd spectacle. Brands, celebrities and politicians compete to show off their piousness, leading to a litany of absurd displays that have more in common with gawdy Christmas festivities than any deep reflection on the millions who gave their lives to maintain our democracy and independence.
People like myself are often caricatured as shallow and disrespectful due to our attitude towards remembrance events. It is a caricature I wholly reject. In our secular world, Nazism symbolises evil. The Allied soldiers who died in the Second World War gave the ultimate sacrifice to stop the spread of evil. Similarly, British soldiers in the First World War died in their hundreds of thousands protecting our neighbours and our national interest from an aggressive imperial Germany.
Remembrance is something innately personal and wearing a poppy because ‘you’re going on tele’ or because the Daily Mail got hysterical*, strikes me as distasteful. My act of remembrance is personal and continuous. My views on the importance of democratic ideals, human rights and international co-operation; and my belief in the importance of using military force or aid to protect people from genocide and authoritarian imperialism, are shaped by my understanding of the world wars and the world they scarred and built anew. My appreciation and understanding of the sacrifices of those who died at war shape who I am and my desire that ‘Never Again’ be a reality rather than an empty homily.
It certainly made sense after the First World War for there be a ritual that brought people together in shared remembrance. A ritual in which everyone remembered the loved ones they lost, together. In doing it as one, we united a nation in a shared understanding of each other’s grief and trauma. But as that grief fades, as the last veterans of the great wars pass away, we no longer literally remember.
Deep down, we know when football fans bow their heads, they’re thinking of their tea, the work they left on their desk, or their chances of making the play-offs this year. There is no shame in this. All of us know the gravity of the sacrifices of those who died in the great wars and we remain grateful for them. But for most of us, remembrance is abstract. When we close our eyes, we can’t picture a face.
In the first half of the 20th century, we knew that those who stood next us on the 11th minute, of the 11th hour, of the 11th day, were filled with pain. Whether they wore a poppy or not, whether they stood still or not, it didn’t matter. Because there was no adult whose lives were untouched by war. There was no one who could not remember.
But today we are consumed with an existential fear of forgetting. To see someone in the street without a poppy; to see someone carry on buying their shopping on the 11th minute, of the 11th hour of the 11th day, or to see a bunch of lads kick-off without a pause, makes us angry, because in them we see ourselves. Do we clutch for symbols — Spitfire murals, tommy silhouette and poppy pins — to ease our anxiety. Do we hold up these symbols to plead, ‘I remember! I really do!’
The incident at that football pitch sticks in my mind for two reason. In one, it summed up the strangeness of the spectacle. Like a photoshopped poppy on an MP’s portrait, we knew it was a charade. Secondly, I saw that I was surrounded by my contemporaries and I remember how the reacted away from public view.
The Labour Staffer team is made up of current and ex-parliamentary researchers. Many work in public affairs and communications for businesses and charities. Quite a few will be councillors and maybe a couple will run for Parliament one day. I know a few of the lads quite well. I know that like me they will find humour in Harry the Hornet reflecting on those who fought for his freedom to one day troll Wilfried Zaha, they will find the humour in the spectacle revealing itself.
So when I see figures who are overwhelmingly of the same political/cultural tribe as me — the same tribe willing to mock the spectacle for its shallowness — suddenly make a show of attending a remembrance service* when they’re running for election, I cannot help but feel cynical. Hence my tweet.
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Reading this, you may think I am a fruit juice drinking sandal wearer. The descendent of those unpatriotic pacifist, vegetarian Quakers and nudists that Orwell despised. I probably am. But I think many of my contemporaries are too.
But once again, I am anxious that my contemporaries are better at hiding themselves than me.
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*I appreciate that for sections of our community remembrance services are important an moment, personally and civically, for them to connect to their past. However, I feel sceptical towards people with a propensity to take ‘I was there’ photographs at these ceremonies of solemn reflection. I can’t help but feel in doing so, they help commodify remembrance by using it for political clout and kudos, and help continue its transition into a mere spectacle.
*I worry that the Daily Mail’s Premier League Poppy campaign wasn’t driven by an earnest and powerful belief by individual journalists and editors that this was a fitting way to remember our fallen. But instead was a cynical brand-making exercise that was motivated by their urge to sell more papers. If that was the case, it is pretty offensive and perfectly sums up ‘poppy culture’ which cheapens the meaning of remembrance.
