It’s a great pity when life is so full of avaricious commercial operators shouting at the public, that even those who do inalienable good, such as charities, feel the need to copy them. I do sympathise – how else are they to be heard? But in fact, I think that is a misconception: most of the public is entirely capable of distinguishing between the two and acting accordingly. I rather suspect that the problem comes from the executives of charities, who more and more closely resemble the CEO’s of big business, maybe on  occasions are even one and the same, and self-promotion is the one strategy they know. After all, they probably have targets to meet.

So I was somewhat displeased to receive a good month or more ago, in the mail (which will have cost) a wooden cross (which will have cost) with a poppy attached, some rather over-assertive promotional material and a donation form. This commemoration is for good reason focussed on 11^th November, and does not need to start in early October just to steal a march on the competition.

My other reasons are regrettably more political: the lesser is the memory that for years, my former employer required me to wear a poppy (at my own expense)  ‘to set a good example to the pupils’. I felt it did the opposite, by turning a voluntary gesture of patriotic remembrance into an act of corporate policy. And it certainly removed from those who might have wanted it, the opportunity to set an example of a different kind.

And more seriously still, in the past twelve months, I have seen too many social media pictures of French war cemeteries deployed in the service of the Brexit movement. If the two are to become conflated, I will never wear a poppy again: this Remembrance should remain essentially apolitical, and if those whom I consider to have committed the most atrocious act of national vandalism are going to claim, even incidentally, the poppy as a symbol of their so-called patriotism, then I can no longer comply.

Inasmuch as any of those largely conscripted dead really held the lofty ideals we often attribute to them, I suspect they too would be appalled at the wanton damage by some in this country to the internationalism that was founded to stop more having to follow them. Furthermore, the misappropriation of symbolism by overt nationalist movements has far too many uncomfortable historic precedents for me to be comfortable with it.

I may be taking this too seriously, but I think not: these are serious matters. I hope someone from the Haig Fund, which I have supported for many decades is reading this, and reflecting on the implications of other people following suit. It is a long-standing national institution that does not need to stoop to base commercialism; charitable giving is a principled, voluntary activity, and the hard-sell only serves severely to undermine that ethic.

And in the current political climate, the Haig Fund (as it was) perhaps also needs to look hard at who is, by accident or design claiming its totem, and for what purposes.