The overlapping quarrels about this year’s Armistice Day commemorations – over marches, policing, and new foreign wars – have tended to obscure what might otherwise have been a central question: is it not time for this country to take a new look at its national acts of remembrance?
To which an answer might be: that it is precisely the simultaneous eruption of these quarrels that shows why a rethink is both necessary and urgent. For while the observance of Remembrance Day has changed to an extent over the decades, what change there has been has tended to be ad hoc and spontaneous – leaving a baggy and ill-coordinated set of rites and traditions behind. Some will see this change in the best British sense of muddling through, but is it not possible to do better?
I wonder, for instance, how far the dispute about the planned Palestinian march through central London initially reflected confusion. The nightmare image in the public mind’s eye seemed to be a repeat of the recent mass marches with Palestinian flags that could rival, disrupt or even displace, the national commemoration at the Cenotaph, and the military veterans’ march-past along Whitehall. There was loose talk that the Cenotaph could be “desecrated” (a surprisingly inflammatory word to have come from the lips of a usually phlegmatic prime minister).
