Wear your poppy with pride?

When Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson turned up for the first day of their trial this week, both had poppies in their lapels.

When the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader turned up for their weekly playground name-calling farce (Wednesday PMQs) this week, every MP was wearing a poppy. The scene looked like an Impressionist’s wet dream.

Bankers being grilled by Parliamentary Committees were wearing them. I’d be willing to bet Sharon Shoesmith was wearing one. Illegal gatherers of poppies for drugs in Afghanistan (if about to be photographed) would no doubt hastily don one.

The Remembrance Day poppy – so long the symbol of personal sacrifice for the greater good – has become just another deliberately mixed signal used by spin doctors: “Wear a Poppy Ed/Dave, it’ll play well with the masses”.

In the century that has passed since the outbreak of The Great War, Poppies in the lapel have gone from being a sign of appreciative patriotism via a symbol of futile but glorious death, to what they are today: the means by which spinelessly greedy sh*ts pretend that they care. I watch this annual ritual now, and feel ashamed of my country.

The First World War was the first exposition of how industrialisation had revolutionised the nature of international conflict. Gallantry was still in fashion, but now the pointed sabre was up against mechanised killing machines that could wipe out 300,000 men in a day. The poor devils who suffered a life of awful degradation in the trenches were, in reality, doing little more than obeying a military timetable, and four or five witless diplomatic agreements. The whole pavane was completely pointless. Ask historians today what we (or they) were fighting for, and most admit that the answer was “for nothing of any real importance”.

But even in that context, ordinary blokes and very rich blokes gave their lives because they believed The Cause was worth dying for. The Second World War was a very different case: it was a struggle against militarist fascism and lunatic ideology….albeit at the same time, one fought to save the British Empire and the Soviet Union – and protect the nascent American global hegemony. But here once again, those who were genuine believers in democracy, liberty and anti-fascism volunteered to fly for us in the Battle of Britain (Poles, Americans and French as well as many brave Aussies and Canadians). They made the journey on D-Day to recapture Europe, and dug deep to stop the Nazis on the Eastern Front. They died, probably, for something worthwhile this time.

Sacrifice is the key word here. Show me all the self-obsessed tits I’ve seen wearing poppies in the public eye this week, and I will show you people who would, I am sure, have sued for peace after Dunkirk. Even worse, their grandfathers in some aristocratic cases would’ve let Hitler conquer Bolshevism to save their own worthless necks.

For the vast majority of legislators in the House of Commons – and the Lords – today, ‘sacrifice’ is what other people do for them. For Ed Balls, the Coop bondholders have been sacrificed to enable his gravy-train to continue. For Nick Clegg, the needs of Britain have been sacrificed to ensure his EU pension retains its value. For George Osborne, the needs of young housebuyers have been sacrificed for the sake of his political reputation. And for David Cameron, the joy of those who revel in our unique countryside has been sacrificed on the altar of Mammon – aka, the hugely Conservative-supporting British construction industry.

So let me tonight offer an idea that I think fits rather well into the “naming and shaming” bollocks that has typified so much of the Blairmeron Years. I would very happily accept a further 0.025p in the Pound tax rate purely to fund an apolitical organisation whose sole job was to adjudge anyone in public life’s right to wear a red poppy.

Those making up this jury (I think twelve would be more than enough) would be those of unimpeachable credentials in the field of genuine sacrifice. For starters, I would name Tory MP Bob Stewart and Labour MP Kate Hoey from the political arena. It really wouldn’t be that difficult to locate the others, as they are all well-liked and well-known – but very rare.

Ordinary folks could of course carry on paying whatever they can to buy a poppy, but that’s alright because they wouldn’t be photographed doing so. However, the absence of red blotches on the suits of the powerful would, I suspect, be rapidly noticed and remarked upon.

Inflicting an effective ASBO on the greedy class would (at least for me) be a form of ironic revenge.