Fifa’s poppy ban: “utterly outrageous”?
“It has become a strange seasonal harbinger,” said The Guardian, “that some sort of argument about the wearing of paper flowers will break out as we prepare to remember millions of fallen soldiers.” This year’s row erupted after Fifa, football’s world governing body, refused permission for England and Scotland players to sport poppies during their World Cup qualifier on Friday, Armistice Day. Fifa said the poppy fell foul of its ban on the display of political symbols. Prime Minister Theresa May called the ban “utterly outrageous”; the English and Scottish football teams declared that they would defy it by wearing black armbands embroidered with poppies, an item Fifa allowed England players to wear during a friendly match with Spain back in 2011.
For Fifa to “object to the honouring of the Glorious Dead is monstrous”, said Simon Heffer in The Sunday Telegraph. This is a body whose “morals are a mixture of those of a whore and a mafioso”, yet it thinks it has the right to stop our players wearing a symbol of sacrifice. It would be better if Fifa took a less prescriptive line on these issues, said Ian Herbert in The Independent, but its stance is hardly “outrageous”. It represents 211 nations. Why should it make an exception for us by allowing the poppy, a symbol that we might not view as
political but that many others do? It’s ridiculous, in any case, that people are making such a big deal about this (“Poppy War”, shouted a headline in the Daily Mail). The last time England played Scotland at this time of the year – in November 1999 – no players wore poppies. Nor did England wear them the last time they played on 11 November itself, when they beat Yugoslavia in Belgrade in 1987.
Back then, paying one’s respect to the dead was still seen as a private act, said Duleep Allirajah on Spiked. We hadn’t yet succumbed to the “poppy fascism” decried by newscaster Jon Snow, which has turned November into ever more of a “cultural minefield” for public figures. We need to “depoliticise” the poppy by relocating grief to “where it properly belongs: the private sphere”. The situation has got out of control, agreed Dani Garavelli in The Scotsman. “So apparently shameful is it to be caught without a poppy, No. 10 last year Photoshopped one onto the profile picture on David Cameron’s Facebook page.” We all need to step back and remind ourselves what the poppy originally represented: “not a fashion accessory, nor a testament to our rectitude, nor a celebration of our Britishness, nor a call to arms; but a howl of outrage against senseless slaughter and a commitment never to let it happen again”.