War was shamelessly used as an instrument of foreign policy

Discussion on the Today programme this morning on BBC Radio 4 about "poppy fascism".  This is a tendentious description of the undoubted public pressure on public figures to wear commemorative poppies, especially on television, in the period before Remembrance Sunday.  The debate on Remembrance conventions is not new - in the 1970s Labour Leader Michael Foot courted controversy by wearing a green "donkey jacket" at the Cenotaph in Whitehall and was widely condemned for not wearing black.

Given the state of profound disgrace that currently envelopes the BBC, it will be interesting to see whether Newsnight presenter Paul Mason will have the nerve to appear on the programme without a poppy (as he did last year).  In a period of fast-eroding support for the Corporation this might be one provocation too far.  Possibly Newsnight will send Paul Mason abroad somewhere until after 11th November.

On Tuesday 11th November itself I will switch over to Channel 4 News to see Jon Snow make his (by now conventional) annual protest by refusing to wear a poppy.

Note added 25th October:  when Jon Snow interview Chairman of the BBC Trustees Lord Patten on Channel 4 News this evening it was very noticable that Lord Patten was wearing a poppy.

As soon as one starts to consider amending the traditional ways of commemorating "the fallen" all sorts of issues begin to arise.  Presumably Jon Snow deeply disapproved of the settler administration in colonial Rhodesia, and yet the Rhodesian contribution to the war effort was proportionally greater than any other part of the then British Empire and rebel Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith was himself a former Battle of Britain pilot.  Are we to disregard the efforts of people and communities of whom many people disapprove? (Bomber Harris, Jan Smuts, Lord Kitchener etc).  Would a Jon Snow-style sanitisation and historical cleansing of the Remembrance commemorations refocus on aspects of conflict approved of by the left and in a way that the left finds palatable?

Or is it better to leave things as they are?

On the Today programme this morning a Dr Harrison said he wanted to avoid glorification of war.  The most straight-forward way of doing this would presumably be to advise people not to vote Labour.  In the post-war period Labour has been the most bellicose of all the political parties, and under the Blair administration war was shamelessly used as an instrument of foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq ("the People's War"?), generating thousands of additional casualties and "fallen" to be commemorated annually by their families at least until 2060.

It is ironic that without the Blair wars the vast quasi-imperial ceremony in Whitehall would probably be coming to an end as the last of the Second World War veterans passed away.