Why I can't risk wearing a poppy this year

I’ve always had a little ritual around buying my annual poppy. I’m a fiend for Halloween, so when I wake up groggy with a horror-hangover on November 1, I know it’s time to get one on my lapel and keep it there until after Armistice Day.

This year, it’s different. The poppy, unconscionably, has become infected by the far-right. Like the flags of the home nations, the kind of people our grandparents fought in the Second World War have sought to make this symbol of sacrifice their own. 

I won’t wear a symbol that’s been hijacked by the far-right. I want the poppy, and those flags, reclaimed from the bigots and extremists. But I see nobody in power fighting that cause. 

Many may disagree with me, and I respect that, but I believe the symbol has been sullied by its adoption among a despicable minority who would more likely have collaborated with the Nazis than taken up arms against them.

Evidently, the vast majority of folk who wear the poppy do so for the most honourable of reasons, but we cannot pretend that those who abuse and shame its symbolism don’t exist. And I don’t wish to be associated with them in any way.

This isn’t a casual decision on my behalf. I’ve worn the poppy when it was frankly dangerous to do so. I approach the question of whether or not to wear it with great unhappiness and solemnity.

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Let me explain, and in doing so, hopefully illuminate why my emotions around the poppy this year are so fraught. 

My family make-up is tortuously complex. In brief: I was raised in a family in Northern Ireland where one side was British, unionist and Protestant, and the other Irish, republican and Catholic.

I’ve zero truck with religion. I’ve been an atheist since grammar school. The notion of ‘God’ just always seemed absurd to me. 

So I was uninfluenced by sectarianism in my youth. Politically, though, I’m strongly in favour of a United Ireland, achieved by democratic, peaceful means.

However, in Northern Ireland, in the 1980s, that made me an avowed republican. 

Let me pause there, and turn to my family history. The way it meets in confluence with my own personal politics matters. In turns what may seem black and white, into a more nuanced shade of grey. 

My family has a long military tradition - on all sides. Some fought for Ireland in the 1919-21 War of Independence; others fought for Britain in both world wars. I’m as proud of one side as I am the other. 

Armistice Day allows me to commemorate my forebears who, in particular, fought Nazism.

My English grandfather stands tall among these ancestors. A sailor, he fought and was wounded in both world wars. He died just before my birth, his war wounds finally claiming him. 

Although I never knew him, he’s my hero. He fought fascist Blackshirts in the east end of London when they came for his Jewish pals. 

In the 1930s, when there were no jobs for working-class men like him, he earned a living as a bareknuckle boxer. 

His hatred of the far-right, passed down to me by my grandmother and mother, shaped me politically.

So in the 1980s, as Northern Ireland tore itself apart, and folk like me who believed in a United Ireland would sooner go naked than don a poppy, I was proud to wear one in his memory.

I also wore the poppy in memory of my great-uncle, another sailor who died on the Atlantic convoys, and my many other relatives who fought and survived two world wars.

It wasn’t easy wearing the poppy in Northern Ireland back then if you had views like mine. But nobody could make me do otherwise, even if they threatened me - which sometimes they did. 

I was - and remain - by inclination ‘bloody-minded’ as my mother would say, or an ‘awkward sh**e’ as my father would put it less gently.

When I say I’ve risked violence for wearing a poppy, I don’t exaggerate. When I say that I’ve thought long and hard about the meaning of the poppy, I don’t exaggerate. 

I was able to wear the poppy at a time when it was seen by many like me as a hated symbol of British rule in Ireland. 

I saw it as more than that. I saw it as a symbol of the kind of bravery I could only imagine and of the struggle to save democracy in Europe.

This year though I’m heart-sick at the thought of not putting the poppy on to commemorate my grandfather and great-uncle and all my long-dead relatives who risked their lives, and all the men and women who fought fascism. 

I believe their sacrifice to be the greatest made in history, and their generation to be the greatest which ever lived.

But how can I wear a symbol that’s been corrupted by fascists? Stolen by fascists from the majority of good people who wish to pay tribute to those who fought for freedom. 

Extremists have claimed the poppy, just as they’ve claimed the St George’s flag, and just as they’re trying - unsuccessfully I may add - to claim the Saltire.

I believe my grandfather himself would rise out of his grave and rip the poppy off my chest if I was to wear it now it has been corrupted by the far-right. 

I won’t wear a white poppy. I’m not a pacifist, nor were my relatives who died for beliefs I only talk about. 

Yet I want to pay my respects to the men and women who defended us against the type of bastards who now hijack the poppy. 

I’ve a plan, and I hope it provides me a moral middle-ground, and one which my dead relatives may find acceptable were they alive. How I wish I could ask them what’s best.

I’ll buy a poppy, hoping my donation goes to aid the very last of that greatest of generations in the care homes and hospitals which look after them. 

On Remembrance Sunday, I’ll take a walk down to the local war memorial near where I live in Glasgow, and I’ll put the poppy down on the stone and say a wee thank you to my granddad and my great-uncle and all the others.

They were people of towering morality - they died for their beliefs after all. So I hope they understand my own moral compromise. 

It is, unfortunately, the only course of action I feel acceptable in this dreadful new era that we’ve forged as a nation.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics