’Tis the season for poppy controversy. Here we have two pieces on differing aspects of the symbol of the Haig Fund. First Brighton ABC’s take on the BNP’s attempted appropriation of Papaver rhoeas, followed by regular columist Ian Bone’s view.
Some of you may have heard about the argument between the British Legion and Nick Griffin over his wearing their poppy lapel badge “in direct contravention of our polite request that you refrain from politicising one of the nation’s most treasured and beloved symbols”. The Legion even went to the extent of writing him an open letter appealed to his “sense of honour” to stop wearing it.
Well, Griffin claims he has been asked to publicise (apparently by soldiers’ families) the ‘fact’ that “Young British soldiers, sitting in hospital in Selly Oak, having lost limbs fighting for the country, are having to pay to watch TV in the wards, while criminal scumbags are sitting in prison watching TV for free”. Except of course prisoners don’t get to watch TV for free and one would have thought Griffin would know this, mixing every day with so many ex-prisoners. The only TVs prisoners get to watch are those in association areas, where they have little or no control over what is on. If they want to watch a TV over which they have control, they have to ‘earn the privilege’. And it hey have ‘earned the privilege’, it costs them £1.50 a week to hire that TV and, when the average weekly wage for a prisoner is around £8, that amounts to nearly 20% of their wage. I bet Griffin would not countenance paying 20% of what he is earning from the EU parliamentary gravy train on the same ‘privilege’. If he actually was concerned about hospital patients being forced to pay exorbitant prices for the privilege of watching TV or for making and receiving phone calls from their beds, he would be taking on the people who negotiated these lucrative deals with the private providers, not taking cheap shots at prisoners. After all, they are suffering the same sort of extortion on the pricing of their phone calls to their nearest and dearest.
Brighton ABC
Despite its annual proximity to Remembrance Sunday, I can never recall seeing anyone at the Anarchist Bookfair wearing a poppy. Maybe this year as the outpouring – indeed out of the closet – support for our Second World War fighters on the previous post demonstrates, some poppy wearers might be a first step before we contemplate a wreath laying at local war memorials or the Cenotaph.
Certainly anything at the Cenotaph ought to be heartfelt and low key … but we really ought to be reclaiming the day from Royals and Party leaders. It was our fucking class that won the war – maybe at long last we can show some pride in it.
I did wear a poppy last year on the Notting Hill Bash The Rich march and there was a furious response on the Libcom Forum from one individual like it was the sell out of a lifetime!!
It may be that after all it wasn’t my generation of 1968 that were the true radicals, but our boring old mums and dads in their stuffy clothes and values that were the truly radical generation – fighting the war, bringing in the Labour landslide of ’45, voting in Communists, ILPers and the almost anarcho-utopian Commonweal party in the war.
As always Orwell summed up the Left’s problem with patriotism and derided how out of touch with our people they were. Orwell said it was the upper class and the working class who valued physical courage and bravery – the middle class sneered and mocked it … check out how that pans out in our movement now, comrades.
For Orwell in 1940 that meant dismissing the leftie pacifists and turning the forerunner of the Home Guard into a revolutionary fighting force. He even imported Spanish anarchists to teach petrol bomb throwing in sedate Osterley Park!
We need a similar sea change in our attitude to our Englishness and our recent history. Seeing Michael Vaughan’s tearful exit from being England’s cricket captain – stress, mate, stress – recalls Australian cricketer Keith Miller’s response when asked if he got stressed in a test match. Miller had been a fighter pilot in the war: “Listen, mate, a Messerschmitt up your arse is stress – this is just a fucking game.”
Ian Bone
