Remembrance Day

(This is going to be a bit ranty and, I'm sorry, probably quite poorly structured as a result.)

I've only come close to a proper act of vandalism once in my life - one that could have cost me my job - and that was when I was on a contract to the Royal Bank of Scotland. Working in Edinburgh, on Dundas Street, was wonderful and even now, many years later, I still feel a little rush of 'coming home' whenever I arrive in the city. However, on one occasion, I had to go up to the main office on St Andrew's Square and there, in the foyer, was a life sized painting of Douglas Haig.

It was Douglas Haig who oversaw the senseless and careless slaughter of tens of thousands of young men at the Somme and many other battles in the first world war. I'll pause at this point to say that over the last two or three decades, there has been - in that popular attention seeking fashion of rejecting an embedded historical interpretation - an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation, so let me just also mention that he was the man who invented concentration camps (during the Boer War). Anyway, seeing his portrait, I found an urge to deface it that I have never felt about anything else in my life.

All of my grandfather's brothers died in the first world war and I am often minded of the quote "War is young men dying and old men talking"*

(As an aside, it's easy to see that same attitude manifest in the Tory party right now. We aren't all in this together: the poor, the disadvantaged and those who can't defend for themselves are the ones who are in it, and up to their necks at that.)

My local MP, for whom I normally have nothing but praise, posted on Facebook that "We bow our heads, stop for a moment and think about our armed forces and their service and our sacrifice. The fought and died to defend our freedom. Never forget, and never again." Which is, of course, complete bollocks. In the last 25 years, Britain has become embroiled in three separate wars, firstly - and unforgivably - for oil, once in a futile effort to stop the Taliban and lastly because, well, Bush and Blair fancied it. We might never forget but "never again" is not on the agenda.

In my lifetime, all I have seen is politicians demean the courage and commitment of the young men and women of our armed forces, who have been thrown into the frontline of these political conflicts.

This morning I went to a memorial service at the local primary school - to see my daughter, Abi, play 'The Last Post', beautifully - and left feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong in exposing these young children - five year olds observing a two minute silence - to the sheer horror of war and expecting them to understand and process what they were being told. I left feeling grumpy and "stabby".

All afternoon I mulled on not only pointlessness of war but the ethical failure of a government that will send its young people to war and then ignore their injuries and trauma when they return, "mission accomplished". We should be wearing poppies to commemorate a sacrifice, not buying them because our heroes require charity. It is shameful.

In the afternoon, I drove out to Barbon, a small village in which I lived for a while, to visit their war memorial. This little village lost seven young men in the first world war. Everyone would have known them, they would have gone to school together, they might even have been old enough to work together before they were sent to the front.

It was all very well everyone taking to Facebook and Twitter when Lee Rigby died, demonstrating their righteous anger and nationalism but British soldiers and, indeed, soldiers fighting against us, whether conscripts or ideologues, are killed, maimed and traumatised every single day. When I was in that primary school assembly, the teacher asked a slightly bewildered assembly "What did we learn from the first world war?" and one child replied "That they died for us.", which was taken as correct answer but the truth is that we have never learned the lessons from the first world war, which is that the old and the privileged  are happy to spend the lives of the young and brave for their own political capital.

*I wasn't sure where this was from and then @headfirst_dom posted it yesterday. Odysseus, apparently.