Same sunset, 10th November 2025. Today i’ve been a bit on edge, my expressing my opinions over rememberance sunday has lost me a few friends.
I happen to agree with the veteran who appeared on TV recently and said he was/is ashamed of what the UK has become, that his friends died for nothing.
I was so moved by this, and previously by Harry Leslie Smith and Harry Patch and their testimony before they died, I wrote and performed 3 pieces of spoken word poetry about it.
100-year-old Royal Navy veteran Alec Penstone, who cleared mines during D-Day, declared: “The sacrifice wasn’t worth what the result is now… What we fought for was our freedom; even now, [the UK] is worse than it was when I fought for it.”
Henry John “Harry” Patch (1898–2009) was the last surviving British combat veteran of the First World War. He said “War is organised murder, and nothing else.” He elaborated that the conflict was “not worth it… not worth one, let alone all the millions.”
He also said “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”
WW2 Veteran Harry Leslie Smith said in 2013 that he would “wear the poppy for the last time,” criticizing its co-optation to justify “our folly in Iraq”.
The poppy isn’t ours, it is theirs, it belongs to them.
Who are we to say what it means?
It fucking grinds my gears to watch these gouls surround the cenotaph in London laying wreaths when they all are profiting personally from the arms trade and the war in Gaza/Israel and the Ukraine.
The hypocrisy is so “in your face” it’s unbelievable.
Since the current administration took office Britain has exported over £143 billion in military hardware and munitions (approximately, whats on public record) and yet the gouls have the sheer bollox to parade and shed fake tears for the fallen?
We (Britain) continue to profit from death when we promised the veterans of WW1 and 2 “Never again………”
Such hypocrisy is incomprehensible to me.
A series of 3 pieces of spoken word poetry for remembrance Sunday.
