TODAY, the annual Remembrance Sunday commemoration is held in London to honour the contribution of service personnel and civilians in the two World Wars and successive conflicts. It is a sombre occasion: the military bands stirring, the uniforms and greatcoats immaculate, and the church bells muffled. The crimson poppy wreaths are laid, while thousands of marchers salute the Cenotaph.
It is a day of remembering, honouring and thanksgiving. It is also one of the country’s most important charity fund-raisers. Last year, the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal (RBL) raised £49.2million, and this year the target is £53.1million. These contributions support the Legion’s work, including financial support for ex-service personnel, advice about housing, employment and mental health, and care homes and recovery programmes.
But with the passing of time, this symbolism has become problematic. On the one hand, displays have become ever more elaborate and showy. In Skegness this year, the RBL branch organised a vast cascading display of more than 80,000 individual poppies, all handmade from all over the world – a ‘very humbling’ experience, according to Tracy Turner, branch vice-chair. Meanwhile some displays have been vandalised, including last year’s giant installation in Eastleigh, Hampshire, where poppies were ripped down from lampposts.
Prominent celebrities have refused to wear a poppy. Oxford historian Adam Gregory has written that as the survivor generation dies out – Harry Patch, the last surviving veteran of the First World War, died in 2009 – ‘ceremonies have become related in the public mind less to individual grief and more to national pride’.
Organisations have emerged which actively oppose the celebrations. One group, called Muslims Against Crusades, burned poppies during the two-minute silence on Armistice Day, chanting anti-British slogans, and one member was prosecuted for public order offences. Another veteran was allegedly assaulted in Edinburgh’s Waverley station while selling poppies during a pro-Palestinian rally. For young people especially, many find buying a poppy too close to nationalism, and see it as ‘similar to hanging a St George’s flag in the window of your sitting room’.
It is not only ‘far-right’ groups who are accused of appropriating the poppy. The ‘far left’, in the form of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), have subverted the practice through the selling of white poppies in the run-up to Remembrance Day as part of a campaign against the ‘glorification’ of war. Sales are especially buoyant in schools and universities, and among Muslim school students, with most people wearing them as a gesture of solidarity with Gaza.
Lord Dannatt, former head of the Army, disapproves of this ‘hijacking’ of Remembrance Day, while Bob Seely, former soldier and Tory MP, said: ‘Wearing a poppy has nothing to do with current conflicts in other parts of the world, or political affiliation in the UK.
‘Schools doing this are doing the wrong thing, and are missing the point and purpose of Remembrance weekend. Wearing a poppy is about remembering those who fought and died for this country. Left-wingers should not be politicising this event or hijacking it to peddle their own, very often confused, set of beliefs.’
So what actually is the point of the Poppy Appeal ?
According to the Rational Forum substack, Remembrance Day is a pause during which Britain remembers and honours those who served their country, in the mud of Flanders, the skies over the Ruhr, and the deserts of Iraq. But these days, service people return too often to a nation which seems to have forgotten ‘the covenant of care’. This is nothing less than a national scandal. Around 7,500 veterans are currently sleeping rough or in refuges, mainly supported by the charity of those who contribute to the RBL’s appeal.
Governments, both Tory and Labour, have been pouring billions into housing asylum seekers and illegal small-boat arrivals – people who have contributed nothing whatsoever to the nation. Meanwhile, more than 400 disused or surplus barracks lie fallow, according to the Ministry of Defence Land Holdings Bulletin 2025, including 300 former RAF stations, 80-90 Army barracks, 20-30 Navy or joint facilities, derelict airfields and camps in the Highlands, many contaminated with asbestos or unexploded ordnance.
This, claim the substack writers, is not mere mismanagement. It is a profound betrayal, ‘a national ingratitude dressed up as fiscal prudence and humanitarian necessity’. Sales of disused sites have generated over £1billion to date.
They go on to contrast the situation of asylum seekers and homeless veterans. As of June this year, 110,000 asylum seekers are housed in supported accommodation. The Home Office’s asylum contracts for 2019-2029 have ballooned to £15.3billion, with £5.5million daily spent on hotels. At the same time, veterans are allocated a mere £8-12million in total through Operation Fortitude and the Returning Veterans Homelessness Programme, which managed to rehouse a mere 400 by 2024, in spite of the 2023 pledge to end rough sleeping.
The scandal runs deeper than the costs alone. Housing an asylum seeker in a disused barracks costs an estimated £200-300 per night, not just for a bed, but security guards, three hot meals, on-site GP, welfare officers, transport, and legal safeguarding, all run by private contractors pocketing millions in profits.
For the homeless veteran, the budget is £20 per day to cover a shared flat, a weekly PTSD session, a benefits form filled in by a charity caseworker, no fences, no catering, and no ‘public confidence’ budget. In other words, a tenth of the taxpayers’ money that goes towards asylum seeker maintenance, which is even criticised as ‘prison-like’ by groups like MSM. So much for ‘Homes for Heroes’ and national pride. Until this situation changes, the Poppy Appeal represents almost all our veterans are entitled to.
How despicable and shabby that this shortfall has to be made up by the voluntary sector, while people are paying millions in taxation to fund asylum-seeking aliens. How totally uncaring and neglectful of our successive governments. This is why I have nothing but contempt for the faux-solemnity of all those dignitaries who show up at the Cenotaph every November, yet in their official capacities turn a callous blind eye to the shameful predicament of so many homeless veterans.
Along with the Rational Forum, I ask: ‘Will we persist in this parsimony while our veterans vanish into the margins? Or will the weight of witness, those 7,500 souls, finally compel a reckoning, forcing red and blue both to honour the oath they swore in poppy-pinned pieties, or confess the poppies were plastic all along?’
