The politics of poppies

The politics of poppy-wearing shift slightly each year. The unofficial rule used to be that poppy-wearing began at the start of November. In recent years this has crept forward further and further into October, largely, I think, because of politicians and the BBC.

The BBC lives in terror of someone appearing on one of its programmes without a poppy and thus sparking a round of ‘BBC presenter in poppy snub’ stories in the papers. If you appear on the BBC during this period you will find people on hand to pin a poppy on anyone not already sporting one. To my mind this slightly misses the charitable, not to mention voluntary, purpose of the exercise.

But politicians have also fuelled this poppy mission-creep. Each year they begin to wear their poppies earlier. This too has a motivation. I suspect it is that if a politician wears a poppy early enough then the happy day may arrive when they will be seen wearing a poppy while their political opponent stands poppy-less. Thus they can imply, if never actually say, that their opponent is less supportive of the armed forces than they are. Ed Balls seems to have been wearing one for weeks. Again, this does not seem to me the ideal motivation for wearing a poppy.

Which brings me to my point. We treat our military appallingly in this country. We pay them abysmally.  We frequently misuse them abroad. Even apart from what we expect of them there, we also use them as an extra emergency-service at home. Last summer, when a private company looked set to make the Olympics a security disaster, thousands of soldiers had their leave cancelled and were bussed in to provide additional security for the Olympics.