If you're a right-thinking, intelligent, decent individual who likes to have his or her blood boiled from time to time, surf over to www.whitepoppy.org. This well-meaning but rather stupid organisation should get your circulation going at a good simmer.

Why? Well, every year at about this time they promote white poppies as an alternative to the more usual red ones that we all wear in the run-up to Remembrance Day. The idea is that the white poppy remembers all victims of war (as opposed to just the service personnel who were killed) and is a statement in support of a culture of peace. For the white poppy brigade

the [red] poppy has had its problems. Some people who have chosen not to wear it have faced anger and abuse. It's also got involved with politics. In Northern Ireland, for example, it became regarded as a Protestant Loyalist symbol because of its connection with British patriotism. And a growing number of people have been concerned about the poppy's association with military power and the justification of war. Some people have wondered why, with a state welfare system, the services of the British Legion (slogan: 'Honour the dead, care for the living') are still needed; some say it's disgraceful that they were ever needed at all - though the many suffering people who have depended on help from the British Legion are profoundly grateful. (Governments have been grateful too: 'Governments cannot do everything. They cannot introduce the sympathetic touch of a voluntary organisation'!) [my emphasis]

Getting "involved in politics" is, of course, a terrible sin - if, that is, the politics in question are of a patriotic flavour. The people behind the white poppies don't seem to have any problem at all with getting involved in politics when that involves using their website to advocate a profoundly left-wing point of view. There's a reason why we restrain governments from introducing "the sympathetic touch of a voluntary organisation": once they start there's no stopping them. When the state gets too involved in nannying the living, the freedom won by the dead begins to disappear.

That's not to say we shouldn't have a welfare state or use tax money to look after our veterans, because we should. But the welfare state has to stop somewhere or the government becomes too mighty. That's where organisations like the Royal British Legion step in and do a fantastic job. The staff of the RBL, directly responsible for their own budgets and with a precise knowledge of the people they're helping, almost certainly do a better job of funneling our (donated) cash to veterans than if the government hiked taxes and organised a huge bureaucracy to handle the whole thing.

The White Poppy people (or The Peace Pledge Union, as they call themselves) are simply prodding people's emotions to promote a political point of view. Just like those nasty nationalists in Northern Ireland, in fact.

The other, even better, reason why you shouldn't wear a white poppy is that a lot of the war generation find it profoundly insulting and distressing. The PPU would probably say that that's simply because they don't understand what the white poppy stands for. That's irrelevant: upsetting the elderly is not a price worth paying to make a point as blindingly obvious as "war is bad".

Perhaps instead of a white poppy the Peace Pledge Union should produce a white t-shirt. Much less offensive. They could even include a slogan:

I'M WELL-MEANING BUT NOT VERY BRIGHT

tags: white poppy, remembrance, veterans, socialism, idiocy