What happens is the old buffers deluge the BBC with "it's disgusting" letters if someone doesn't wear a poppy, without examining what their disgust is all about.

Why does the RBL do such stirling work? Because the PM's word is worthless when it comes to the NHS treatment of injured soldiers: he said they would be given priority treatment. Not that he and his are anything more than heirs to a disgusting stitchup that's gone on since Wellington considered his men the scum of the earth, and their fathers were only in the Army because it was the only way to avoid a hanging. It was the Liberals, Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George, who were in charge throughout WWI. Labour bears the responsibility for the latest war, and Cameron for still not doing anything now. Because there is NO decent provision ANYWHERE, in the private sector included, for the mentally harmed. Because the MOD does not treat soldiers and their families like human beings, even now. Once some charity does something the State is supposed to do, some bureaucrat starts pocketing the dosh for his own private projects, without exception. So it becomes "not the done thing" not to support the cop-out.

The poppy is redolent of WWI. It actually became part of the causus belli in Afghanistan! The focus remains around a monument marked "The Glorious Dead". Until that is removed and we weep for our dead as real people (and there are several hundred I have a small part in the responsibility for, which causes me grief each day, and will do until the day I die, I think), and not as icons (the cenotaph being an empty tomb), then we are not acting responsably. How can we really mean "we will remember them" from WWI when we never knew them. Why not Agincourt, Waterloo or any of the myriad other fields of conflict this nation has been involved in? Yet again, it's a cop-out.

It's a cop-out because there is little more that can be done for the dead. They are buried and their graves are maintained: what more can we do for them? Care for their families, perhaps, and that's patchy too. What a responsible Nation does is do what it can for the living, most specifically the injured, and as I've said, we don't. That is the fault of those who take responsibility for the management of the Nation, and when they line up for a Church Service on Whitehall, rather than do something real, anything, for the forgotten Tommies, then excuse me if I puke. I at least always worked on 11th November in Belgium, a Memorial day the Nation has as a holiday, I worked doing something to stop it happening again.

Lest we forget. That in and of itself is a cop out. It must NOT stop with remembering, it goes into the heart of that final verse of Kipling's Tommy:

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! "
But it's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An 'Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!

It's not in the remembering once a year, it's in the doing and undoing every day of the year. Because the lad without legs has it every day of the year. Because the girl who no longer knows which way is up psychologically has it every day of the year. We should not talk of the Glorious Dead, but of the indefatigable survivors, indefatigable because they cannot afford to tire, because they do not have the option of sighing and saying "thank heavens that's over for another year". It's in the very real fact that the vast majority of homeless share a common trait: they are former members of the military. We need serious and committed provision: the US has gone a small step in realising the truth of the need for provision for veterans, but the reality of the matter even there is also scandalous: the Inspector General is mired in a major furore over Phoenix, as the tip of an iceberg.

And until that happens, the pious claptrap of yesteryear becomes a copout we should name as a hypocritical, shameful excuse.