AT what point does our desire to sanctify the blood of the fallen in two world wars become something oppressive? When it’s deployed to accuse and to intimidate; as an instrument of a witch-hunt, does it cease to be something pure and innocent?

On November 11 each year we are supposed to commemorate the ultimate act of love: the laying down of one’s life that unknown others might survive to be free and perhaps to give the gift of love themselves and to receive it in return. Now we are contaminating the memory of those who performed the greatest act of love by turning that which symbolises it into something shrill and shallow.

Once, the poppy was something to be worn quietly and discreetly or to be placed gently and without fanfare at a graveside or a war memorial. Now it has become something to be wielded and brandished; to be proclaimed and announced while self-appointed tribunes scan the masses looking for signs of sullenness and dissent: these being punishable by a visit to the scaffold of the 21st century: a snatched iPhone picture and exposure on social media.

In 21st century Britain the poppy has too often become a clashing symbol of division; signifying your allegiance (unwittingly or otherwise) to something much shallower than the mere desire to liberate others.

To wear it is to be accused in the eyes of some of endorsing wars fought for darker purposes and not to wear it is deemed to be treacherous and disrespectful and of giving succour to Britain’s enemies, both real and imagined. It is lamentable when we ought only to be lamenting the sacrifices of those who fell for something few of them understood.

Remembrance Sunday has now expanded to become a season which starts around September and lasts until the first week of Advent. No-one dare risk appearing on television during this period without sporting a poppy lest they bring down the ire of the patriotic militias who swing into action at this time. In Scotland every senior football team must have the poppy stitched into the fabric of their jerseys and a minute’s silence must be observed at every ground. Reporters and newspapers driven by agendas other than commemorating the sacrifices at the Somme or Passchendaele take gleeful delight in hounding the dissidents.

Until relatively recently, you bowed your head and uttered a silent prayer or paused to observe a two-minute silence at your place of work if November 11 fell on a weekday. On the nearest Sunday you watched the Queen place a wreath at the cenotaph or perhaps gathered at your local war memorial to remember the members of your own family who had fallen. Now it has become distorted and twisted into a festival. With each passing year the poppies get bigger and the displays become more inordinately bizarre. This little flower with nothing to declare but its God-given colour finds itself pressed into service in huge and preening mosaics and installations which mock the idea of modest self-sacrifice it once represented.

The unconscionable decision to include illegal wars in this commemoration has made it difficult for some to wear the poppy. The refusal to acknowledge this has become a dismal characteristic of Remembrance. It is a betrayal of all that the poppy is supposed to represent. It has also become a recruitment tool for the British armed forces, accompanied by bizarre displays of military hardware and fed by the BBC which spends fortunes sending their reporters to the killing fields to give us whispered despatches without any ounce of context.

Rarely is there any attempt to expose the futility of the First World War and the way that Europe’s royal families aided by the aristocrats and industrialists for whom war is always a Klondyke conspired to make it happen. In other places the poppy and Remembrance Sunday has been hijacked by darker forces which seek to manipulate the emotion of it all into proof of loyalty to Britain. This will be ramped up steadily to fuel a hostile environment in the dangerous post-Brexit years.

Yet, there are more benign and understandable reasons to explain this country’s recent national obsession with making a grim pantomime of the poppy. The left would do well to think about these and reflect upon them. In a time of approaching chaos and during this period when old certainties and traditional ideas of church, community and family are crumbling it’s natural to look for something that represents stability and permanence and to embrace it.

I once wondered at how our emotional attachment to the events of the two world wars seemed to increase rather than diminish with the passing of the years. Yet it’s not really surprising. The values of self-sacrifice, courage and unquestioning loyalty are no longer rewarded in 21st century Britain. Instead they are mocked. The legacy of Margaret Thatcher which is proclaimed by the principal architects of Brexit is a rebuke to self-sacrifice and loyalty. In their place have come self-enrichment at the expense of all else; financial self-gratification and betrayal of your country by depriving the exchequer of taxes. In all of this the poppy increasingly becomes a reminder of humanity at its very best. And perhaps as the signs of humanity at its worst gather it is natural to cling to the poppy more tightly even at the risk of making of it a graven image and a false idol.

I’ll wear a poppy this weekend and I’ll recall once more the words of a good German soldier, Erich Maria Remarque from his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. “But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”