Poppies are only part of the problem, which is a strategy of social control by the right: sacralising the military. Any old ex-thug gets to be a "hero" if they once wore a British Army uniform, and public spaces get taken over by stone and concrete oblongs that we are supposed to treat as temples because they have a list of names on them. There was a new piece of expensive military advertising put up in Glasgow only last week.

The issue is not remembering past wars, it's about remembering what a bunch of murderous arseholes started, profited by, and fought them. Blocks of stone in the street and red paper pasties are about forgetting that, not remembering it. Where are the memorials in Britain to the torture victims of Abu Ghraib? The sailors of the Belgrano? The thousands of Sudanese machinegunned by the British heroes under command at Omdurman? - there could be a separate memorial to mark how much blood Winston Churchill had on his hands for that, but it isn't going to happen, is it?