The red poppy is a powerful sign of a united country
TODAY I will be shaking my collecting can, selling poppies to raise money for the British Legion. My grandfather lost his leg during fighting around Ypres in the First World War and ever after that he worked in a poppy-making factory in Richmond.
It’s the least I can do to honour his memory and wearing poppies brings most of the population together. Yet footage has now come out showing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn pouring scorn on the “shedloads of money” the Government was planning to spend on commemorating the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War in 2014.
Worse than that, he questioned the whole notion of Remembrance, echoing the same old Left-wing critique of the First World War as a pointless “war of declining empires”. “I’m not quite sure what there is to commemorate,” he said, “other than the mass slaughter of millions of young men and women…”
Having written several military history books, I can tell Mr Corbyn that ordinary soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Western Front knew very well how important the war was to contain the aggression of Germany and that their sacrifice was worthwhile. That’s why it’s important to ignore Marxist critics like Corbyn and continue to remember these lives.
It’s no surprise that the footage was uploaded by the Communist Party. Left-wingers have long denigrated the value of soldiers fighting on the Western Front, preferring to cast them in a “Lions led by Donkeys” scenario in which working men were the casualties of a capitalist, imperialist plot. Both sides suffered equally, they say, and every government was to blame for the outbreak of war.
BUT this is simply not true. German Kaisers wanted war in Europe as a means of extending their recently unified nation’s economic hegemony over traditional rivals. They’d already cowed France in the FrancoPrussian War. Europe was to be a German-dominated customs union. After losing two world wars, Germany finally got what it wanted with the EU.
British men went to war to defend Belgium and France