Put poppy politics in the past and give Remembrance a hopeful future

Memory without hope will lead us to a dead-end.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

A woman walls along a war memorial wall covered in red poppies.

War memorial in Canberra.

Raelle Gann-Owens on Unsplash.

Remembrance Day is complicated. A nation shows its gratitude for the service and sacrifice of its armed forces and tries to connect to its history. Never far away, are poppy politics, along with anxiety about identity and forgetting, and fears about nationalism and militarism. Is this the way to remember?

Last November, protests in solidarity with Gaza dominated the headlines. On Armistice Day, hundreds of thousands of people marched through central London to demand a ceasefire. In the preceding weeks, there was vigorous debate about whether the march should be cancelled. There were several motivations for this: there were genuine fears of violence and extremism, and of disruption at the Cenotaph, but also questions of whether marching on Armistice Day was inappropriate or disrespectful.

The march itself was organised to minimise the risk of disrupting public commemorations of Remembrance. It started several hours after the two-minute silence and followed a route several miles from the cenotaph. It was mostly peaceful, although there were arrests for anti-Semitism, open support for terrorism and violent attacks on police officers. Armistice Day did see violence around the cenotaph, but this was from the self-described ‘Cenotaph Defenders’ who had organised a counter-demonstration against the Gaza march. The group of football hooligans and far-right EDL members gathered with poppy emblazoned banners declaring ‘Have some respect for British Heroes’. Within a few hours, the calls for respect had degenerated into violent attacks on serving uniformed officers, in this case the police.

The far-right’s adoption of remembrance symbolism can be seen as an extreme form of a wider entanglement of poppies and politics. The red paper poppy is a symbol of remembrance, but it has other connotations. For some it invokes patriotism and feelings of pride in their country, for others it represents conformity and militarism. Whether television news presenters are wearing them attracts disproportionate attention. In 2019, one Australian TV network had a very tasteless segment denouncing a rival station whose newscasters failed to wear poppies. The non-poppy wearing hosts were accused of failing in their duty to respect their country and to help preserve its culture and traditions. Regardless of the presenters’ actual reasons, this feels like a lot of baggage to load onto the delicate poppy, a symbol of quiet remembrance and gratitude.

Unsurprisingly, this has led many to question whether Remembrance Day has become detached from its original purposes. Twelve years after the death of the last British First World War veteran, there is little living connection to either of the two world wars. With this passage of time, there is a growing danger of mistaking the symbols of ceremonial Remembrance for the thing itself.

The focus of remembrance can shift away from the sheer horrors of war, from awe at the sacrifice of our forebears, and from the resolved ‘never again’ to fixing our gaze on the processed goods: the ceremonial silence, the poppies themselves and even the quality of our own emotional response.

Some commentators have suggested that organised Remembrance has served its purpose and is best forgotten, and that too much remembering is a bad thing, fuelling grudges and sectarian conflicts. Personally, I’m not convinced, but I do think our current Remembrance is missing something.

With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity.

Reflecting on the importance and difficulty of memory, the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel emphasised the importance of hope. Despite the horrific experiences of the twentieth century, for Wiesel it is hope that “summons the future”. Memory without hope would lead us to a dead-end, where we grip onto the past while feeling it slip like sand through our fingers. Many of the anxieties around Remembrance point to a hope deficit.

How can we remember with hope?

We need to broaden our perspective and engage better with our shared national story. We need to be grounded in our history, stories and myths but we also need to be drawn forward by the good things we have and will have. If this story is big enough then it will be a large tapestry of interwoven strands, and we will be able to generously incorporate new strands, other cultures with their own relationship to the past into it. We will also be better prepared for our remembering to deal with difficult questions about our nation’s history. With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity. Hope would connect us better to our neighbours overseas and to the men and women who risk their lives to serve their country.

Last Remembrance Sunday, I helped our church’s under-7s make big paper poppies out of red paint and paper plates. The older children made origami peace cranes, and both the big red poppies and the peace cranes were placed by the altar. Here the focus is on remembering, but not just on our own memory. For me and countless other Christians, God’s memory is the real focus. God remembers us in our broken and war-torn world, and as Jesus, chose to join us in it, experiencing the worst of suffering while dying a painful death. All our personal and collective stories of pain, loss and sadness are met in this sacrifice. More than this, in the promises of restoration Jesus gave when He rose from the dead, they find a concrete hope.

What does Remembrance look like when it’s really grounded in hope? I think there would be a few noticeable signs. It would be less precious about itself. It would be more open to different emphases of remembrance such as the Peace Pledge Union and the white poppy, and excited about new creative expressions of remembrance like the ‘poppy walks’ organised by the Royal British Legion. More patient to the concerns of those who find the religious elements of Remembrance difficult. More integrated into our attitudes to current and ongoing conflict around the world. Most of all I hope it would make us really hungry for both peace and for righteousness.

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Politics

7 May 2025

4 min read

Assisted dying is not a medical procedure; it is a social one

Another vote, and an age-related amendment, highlight the complex community of care.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Graffiti reads 'I miss me' with u crossed out under the 'mem'

Sidd Inban on Unsplash.

Scottish Parliament’s Assisted Dying bill will go to a stage one vote on Tuesday 13th May, with some amendments having been made in response to public and political consultation. This includes the age of eligibility, originally proposed as 16 years. In the new draft of the bill, those requesting assistance to die must be at least 18.

MSPs have been given a free vote on this bill, which means they can follow their consciences. Clearly, amongst those who support it, there is a hope that raising the age threshold will calm the troubled consciences of some who are threatening to oppose. When asked if this age amendment was a response to weakening support, The Times reports that one “seasoned parliamentarian” (unnamed) agreed, and commented:

“The age thing was always there to be traded, a tactical retreat.”

The callousness of this language chills me. Whilst it is well known that politics is more of an art than a science, there are moments when our parliamentarians literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. How can someone speak of such matters as if they are bargaining chips or military manoeuvres? But my discomfort aside, there is a certain truth in what this unnamed strategist says.

When Liam McArthur MSP was first proposed the bill, he already suggested that the age limit would be a point of debate, accepting that there were “persuasive” arguments for raising it to 18. Fortunately, McArthur’s language choices were more appropriate to the subject matter. “The rationale for opting for 16 was because of that being the age of capacity for making medical decisions,” he said, but at the same time he acknowledged that in other countries where similar assisted dying laws are already in operation, the age limit is typically 18.

McArthur correctly observes that at 16 years old young people are considered legally competent to consent to medical procedures without needing the permission of a parent or guardian. But surely there is a difference, at a fundamental level, between consenting to a medical procedure that is designed to improve or extend one’s life and consenting to a medical procedure that will end it?

Viewed philosophically, it would seem to me that Assisted Dying is actually not a medical procedure at all, but a social one. This claim is best illustrated by considering one of the key arguments given for protecting 16- and 17- year-olds from being allowed to make this decision, which is the risk of coercion. The adolescent brain is highly social; therefore, some argue, a young person might be particularly sensitive to the burden that their terminal illness is placing on loved ones. Or worse, socially motivated young people may be particularly vulnerable to pressure from exhausted care givers, applied subtly and behind closed doors.

Whilst 16- and 17- year-olds are considered to have legal capacity, guidance for medical staff already indicates that under 18s should be strongly advised to seek parent or guardian advice before consenting to any decision that would have major consequences. Nothing gets more major than consenting to die, but sadly, some observe, we cannot be sure that a parent or guardian’s advice in that moment will be always in the young person’s best interests. All of this discussion implies that we know we are not asking young people to make just a medical decision that impacts their own body, but a social one that impacts multiple people in their wider networks.

For me, this further raises the question of why 18 is even considered to be a suitable age threshold. If anything, the more ‘adult’ one gets, the more one realises one’s place in the world is part of a complex web of relationships with friends and family, in which one is not the centre. Typically, the more we grow up, the more we respect our parents, because we begin to learn that other people’s care of us has come at a cost to themselves. This is bound to affect how we feel about needing other people’s care in the case of disabling and degenerative illness. Could it even be argued that the risk of feeling socially pressured to end one’s life early actually increases with age? Indeed, there is as much concern about this bill leaving the elderly vulnerable to coercion as there is for young people, not to mention disabled adults. As MSP Pam Duncan-Glancey (a wheelchair-user) observes, “Many people with disabilities feel that they don’t get the right to live, never mind the right to die.”

There is just a fundamental flawed logic to equating Assisted Dying with a medical procedure; one is about the mode of one’s existence in this world, but the other is about the very fact of it. The more we grow, the more we learn that we exist in communities – communities in which sometimes we are the care giver and sometimes we are the cared for. The legalisation of Assisted Dying will impact our communities in ways which cannot be undone, but none of that is accounted for if Assisted Dying is construed as nothing more than a medical choice.

As our parliamentarians prepare to vote, I pray that they really will listen to their consciences. This is one of those moments when our elected leaders literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. Now is not the time for ‘tactical’ moves that might simply sweep the cared-for off of the table, like so many discarded bargaining chips. As MSPs consider making this very fundamental change to the way our communities in Scotland are constituted, they are not debating over the mode of the cared-for’s existence, they are debating their very right to it.