The Poppy Has Withered: Harry Leslie Smith’s Warning We Failed to Heed

On this 80th anniversary of VE Day, as the last veterans gather in dwindling numbers, I find myself returning to the prophetic words of Harry Leslie Smith. His 2013 Guardian article “This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time” resonates even more powerfully today than when he wrote it, twelve years and countless conflicts ago.

Harry Leslie Smith, RAF veteran, working-class warrior, and defender of the welfare state, died in 2018 at the age of 95. If he were alive today, I suspect he would look upon these celebrations with a mixture of sorrow and righteous anger. He would no doubt be aghast as King Charles speaks of seeking “lasting peace” while Keir Starmer beats the drums of war as Britain continues to pour weapons into conflict zones. Harry’s words echo now with painful relevance.

His dismay, I imagine, would have only deepened as he witnessed just how thoroughly his warnings have been ignored.

What Harry Saw Coming

“The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders,” Harry wrote. “The most fortunate in our society have turned the solemnity of remembrance for fallen soldiers in ancient wars into a justification for our most recent armed conflicts.”

How much truer that rings today, on May 8th, 2025. As King Charles channels Churchill’s famous line, “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war”, the hypocrisy is staggering. While America under Trump at least feigns retreat, Britain continues to escalate conflicts abroad. Politicians bow their heads at the cenotaph one minute, and vote to send billions in arms to Ukraine and Israel the next, turning a blind eye to war crimes, while cutting support to the poorest at home.

The contradiction would not be lost on Harry. He refused to wear the poppy because remembrance had ceased to be sacred. The solemnity he once observed was transformed into performative patriotism, a pageant to justify more death.

Harry wore his poppy for deeply personal reasons, the right reasons: “I wear it because I am from that last generation who remember a war that encompassed the entire world… But most importantly, I wear the poppy to commemorate those of my childhood friends and comrades who did not survive the second world war.”

Today’s VE Day will likely be the last major commemoration attended by those who actually fought. Most veterans are now in their 90s or older. Soon, there will be no living witnesses to what was supposedly the war to end all wars, a promise broken repeatedly over these past eight decades.

The Britain Harry Knew

Harry reminded us that the Britain he was born into nine years after the First World War was not the sanitised version portrayed in period dramas:

“I can attest that life for most people was spent in abject poverty where one laboured under brutal working conditions for little pay and lived in houses not fit to kennel a dog today. We must remember that the war was fought by the working classes who comprised 80% of Britain’s population in 1913.”

Harry didn’t buy the glossy official history. He wrote:

”This is why I find that the government’s intention to spend £50m to dress the slaughter of close to a million British soldiers in the 1914-18 conflict as a fight for freedom and democracy profane. Too many of the dead, from that horrendous war, didn’t know real freedom because they were poor and were never truly represented by their members of parliament.

“My uncle and many of my relatives died in that war and they weren’t officers or NCOs; they were simple Tommies. They were like the hundreds of thousands of other boys who were sent to their slaughter by a government that didn’t care to represent their citizens if they were working poor and under-educated. My family members took the king’s shilling because they had little choice, whereas many others from similar economic backgrounds were strong-armed into enlisting by war propaganda or press-ganged into military service by their employers.”

“For many of you 1914 probably seems like a long time ago but I’ll be 91 next year, so it feels recent. Today, we have allowed monolithic corporate institutions to set our national agenda. We have allowed vitriol to replace earnest debate and we have somehow deluded ourselves into thinking that wealth is wisdom. But by far the worst error we have made as a people is to think ourselves as taxpayers first and citizens second.”

And so Harry warned us:

“Today’s politicians have rewritten this history to suggest that ordinary soldiers fought and died for the same vision of Britain they now govern, a nation where wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than even in Harry’s youth, where the NHS his generation built is being dismantled piecemeal, where homelessness and food banks have become normalised in one of the world’s richest economies.”

Those words sting in 2025. Britain today is governed by people who speak the language of remembrance while enacting the opposite. The NHS Harry’s generation built is being dismantled piece by piece. Food banks are now part of the national landscape. The wealth gap has widened to obscene levels, the cost of living crisis…a forgotten burden carried by the poor.

What Would Truly Honour the Dead

Harry understood that what would truly honour those who died fighting fascism is not another military parade but a society that reflects the values they thought they were defending:

“Next year, I won’t wear the poppy, but I will until my last breath remember the past and the struggles my generation made to build this country into a civilised state for the working and middle classes.”

Instead, in 2025, we have a Labour government continuing the work of the Tories, prioritising arms budgets over social care. They find money for war machines, but none for the disabled, the elderly, or the working poor. They call this “fiscal responsibility,” while redistributing upwards at a scale not seen since the 1930s.

Harry’s generation returned from war determined to build something better than what they had left behind. They created the welfare state, the NHS, and council housing not because these were luxuries but because they understood them as necessities for a decent society. Today’s politicians speak of these achievements with reverence while systematically undermining them.

The Conditions That Enable Fascism

Harry also understood something most politicians now conveniently forget: that the Second World War didn’t begin in 1939, it began in the despair and deprivation of the 1930s.

“If we are to survive as a progressive nation, we have to start tending to our living,” Harry wrote, “because the wounded: our poor, our underemployed youth, our hard-pressed middle class and our struggling seniors shouldn’t be left to die on the battleground of modern life.”

Today, those same conditions that enabled fascism’s rise in the 1930s are returning with alarming speed. Political scapegoating, censorship masked as security, and the drumbeat of war growing louder by the day. Working people are being asked to sacrifice more, they struggle to afford basics while being told to blame immigrants or benefit claimants for their hardship. Democratic rights are eroded in the name of security. The steady drumbeat of militarism drowns out calls for diplomacy and peace.

And now we have a Labour government again pushing for foreign intervention, another servant of the military-industrial complex. That same meat grinder that has devoured generations of good men and women.

Harry’s Final Stand Still Stands

If Harry were here today, he would remind us that the legacy of World War II is not endless war, but the hard-won determination to never again send working people to die for imperial vanity or corporate gain.

His final stand wasn’t just against the co-option of remembrance, it was for a better society. One where no one is expendable. Where the peace dividend of 1945 isn’t traded for corporate profits. Where ordinary people are not cannon fodder for the geopolitical games of the so-called elite.

Yes, celebrate the victory over fascism. Honour the courage, the sacrifice, the blood-soaked beaches and broken streets where freedom was fought for. But never forget the cost, and never forget the cause. Because as the last living witnesses to global fascism fade from view, Harry Leslie Smith’s warning becomes not just relevant, but urgent. Remembrance is not a poppy pinned to a lapel, it’s the will to build the just, peaceful society they died believing was possible. That is how we honour them. Not with parades. With purpose.

Harry Leslie Smith knew this. It’s time we listened.

In memory of Harry Leslie Smith (1923-2018) – RAF veteran, writer, and defender of the welfare state

Paul Knaggs