DON’T get me wrong, I love having some Poppy Day disrespect to moan about. But it’s getting earlier every year, and it doesn’t feel right calling someone a traitor in October.
Poppy Day disrespect is beyond disgusting, and also the highlight of my year. There’s nothing like the warm glow of sanctimony I get from criticising disrespectful bastards who don’t wear a poppy.
But condemning them keeps getting earlier, like Christmas. This week journalist Kevin Maguire was harangued on Good Morning Britain for not wearing a poppy, but to be honest it was still two weeks away and maybe he’d just not bought one yet. The last thing we want is for fake poppy controversies to become a joke.
Criticising Poppy Day disrespect is part of what makes us British – angry, intolerant and easily manipulated by the right-wing press. If we start calling people woke leftie snowflakes at the start of October it takes the fun out of Remembrance Sunday itself.
I believe we need an official starting date for Poppy Day disrespect, perhaps November 5th. That’s a good patriotic day when a traitor got arrested and tortured, so it’s perfect for aggressively hassling strangers with an implied threat of physical violence.
Everyone will know where they stand, and the press would still have a whole week to use poppies to undermine anyone left-wing whose other views might include making billionaires like newspaper owners pay a fair amount of tax.
So let’s keep Poppy Day disrespect special, and focus on screaming like lunatics at woke leftie scum who may as well be pissing on the corpses of Our Lads in Flanders, Gold Beach and Goose Green. Thank God some of us still have respect for the dead.
