Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 11 November 2021
On this remembrance day, I wear a white poppy. The white poppy has been worn for more than 80 years to symbolise three things: remembrance of all victims of war, a commitment to peace and a challenge to attempts to glamorise and celebrate war.
On this armistice day, I remember all victims of all wars—those that are in the past and those that are being fought as we speak. Suffering does not stop at national borders, so I include people of all nationalities, members of all armed forces, and all civilians. I remember and acknowledge all those who have been killed in war, wounded in body or mind, or left without homes or health, family or community. I remember family member, friend and stranger. I remember those who have been killed or imprisoned for resisting war or refusing to fight.
However, it is not enough simply to remember. Our remembering must be active. We have a responsibility to all those whom we remember today to act—to strive for a better world—so that we can genuinely mean it when we say, “Never again.”
That is why I include both a commitment to peace and a challenge to militarism in my remembering. That means always seeking non-violent solutions to conflict. It means building our communities and economies on systems and processes that do not lead to war. It means working to ensure that all our Governments and institutions do not promote or contribute to war. It means challenging our economic reliance on arms sales and our investment in nuclear weapons. It means building the support systems—the housing, the healthcare and community—that will keep us all safe and well.
White poppies challenge the promotion of militarism by drawing attention to the human and environmental cost of war. They highlight the urgency of our struggle for peace, and they remind us of the importance of year-round resistance to war and military conflict, because war is not the present or the future that we want.
We will all be familiar with the fine words, the sometimes stark words, and the words of warning and condemnations of violence that have come to us in the form of the poetry of the war poets who served in the first world war. I want to read a bit of poetry.
I will read an extract not from one of those first world war poets, but from Hamish Henderson’s “Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica”. Incidentally, Henderson was born on the first anniversary of armistice day; he would have been 102 today. The extract was written during, after and about the allied campaign in north Africa in the second world war, in which Henderson played a part. It does something very important, profoundly human, yet deeply difficult. It recognises the enemy. It values the enemy, living and dead. It acknowledges the humanity of the enemy. The extract is from “End of a Campaign”.
“There are many dead in the brutish desert,
who lie uneasy
among the scrub in this landscape of half-wit
stunted ill-will. For the dead land is insatiate
and necrophilous. The sand is blowing about still.
Many who for various reasons, or because
of mere unanswerable compulsion, came here
and fought among the clutching gravestones,
shivered and sweated,
cried out, suffered thirst, were stoically silent, cursed
the spittering machine-guns, were homesick for Europe
and fast embedded in quicksand of Africa
agonized and died.
And sleep now. Sleep here the sleep of dust.
There were our own, there were the others.
Their deaths were like their lives, human and animal.
There were no gods and precious few heroes.
What they regretted when they died had nothing to do with
race and leader, realm indivisible,
laboured Augustan speeches or vague imperial heritage.
(They saw through that guff before the axe fell.)
Their longing turned to
the lost world glimpsed in the memory of letters:
an evening at the pictures in the friendly dark,
two knowing conspirators smiling and whispering secrets;
or else
a family gathering in the homely kitchen
with Mum so proud of her boys in uniform:
their thoughts trembled
between moments of estrangement, and ecstatic moments
of reconciliation: and their desire
crucified itself against the unutterable shadow of someone
whose photo was in their wallets.
Their death made his incision.
There were our own, there were the others.
Therefore, minding the great word of Glencoe’s
son, that we should not disfigure ourselves
with villainy of hatred; and seeing that all
have gone down like curs into anonymous silence,
I will bear witness for I knew the others.
Seeing that littoral and interior are alike indifferent
and the birds are drawn again to our welcoming north
why should I not sing them, the dead, the innocent?”
So today, I wear a white poppy. Today, I remember all the victims of all wars. Today, I think of all that war destroys: innocence, safety, hope, love, life. Today, I reaffirm my commitment to work for peace for all.
16:04