Is it time for the UK to rethink the way it remembers its war heroes?

A single day of remembrance would help to tie together the competing strands of memoralisation around this time of year, writes Mary Dejevsky – and help avoid awkward conflicts

The proliferation of events and the duplication of Armistice Day ceremonial in particular cry out to be given a single sense of purpose (PA)

The overlapping quarrels about this year’s Armistice Day commemorations – over marches, policing, and new foreign wars – have tended to obscure what might otherwise have been a central question: is it not time for this country to take a new look at its national acts of remembrance?

To which an answer might be: that it is precisely the simultaneous eruption of these quarrels that shows why a rethink is both necessary and urgent. For while the observance of Remembrance Day has changed to an extent over the decades, what change there has been has tended to be ad hoc and spontaneous – leaving a baggy and ill-coordinated set of rites and traditions behind. Some will see this change in the best British sense of muddling through, but is it not possible to do better?

I wonder, for instance, how far the dispute about the planned Palestinian march through central London initially reflected confusion. The nightmare image in the public mind’s eye seemed to be a repeat of the recent mass marches with Palestinian flags that could rival, disrupt or even displace, the national commemoration at the Cenotaph, and the military veterans’ march-past along Whitehall. There was loose talk that the Cenotaph could be “desecrated” (a surprisingly inflammatory word to have come from the lips of a usually phlegmatic prime minister).

But the Palestinian march was, and still is, planned for Saturday. The national commemoration at the Cenotaph traditionally takes place on a Sunday, as it will again this year – the Sunday closest to Armistice Day. There was thus no prospect of a Palestinian march, or indeed any other march, competing for space on Whitehall or in any way threatening the nation’s time-honoured way of paying respect to its fallen.

This is not to say, however, that there was not – is not – a potential problem. This is because, in addition to the national commemoration on Sunday, there has been a growing trend also to mark the actual time and day of the 1918 Armistice. This year, the 11th day of the 11th month falls on Saturday. At the 11th hour, many people will observe a two-minute silence, as will the national broadcasters. In many stores, shoppers will be invited to join in; on many roads, traffic will come to a halt. Veterans from the Western Front Association will gather at the Cenotaph to remember the dead of the 1914-18 war.

In some respects, what happens on the 11th of the 11th may now have at least as much public participation as the high ceremonial of Sunday. It is among these more popular observances that the marchers for Palestine will have to find their place. Their agreed route, from Hyde Park to the US embassy in Battersea, should be far enough from Whitehall to keep the different causes apart.

That 11 November falls on a Saturday this year, and that there will be ceremonies at the Cenotaph and a national two-minute minute silence on both days, however, highlights what would be an unsatisfactory situation even without the Palestinian complication. The UK now has essentially two duplicating national commemorations within days of each other – one of which includes a still-recognisably Anglican church service, attended by leaders of all the country’s main faiths.

In between comes the Festival of Remembrance. Always on the Saturday evening before the Sunday ceremonies at the cenotaph, its programme has been shifting its shape in response to changing social mores – the role of women in the armed forces, for instance, the nature of modern combat, and even public attitudes to war.

Then there is the Royal British Legion charity and the wearing of poppies, which seem now to be mostly red again, after opposition to the Iraq war prompted white poppies back into favour. This year, too, the BBC seems to have avoided any argument about when its presenters should begin wearing their poppies. It also seems to me that some of the arguments that once raged about the central purpose of Remembrance Day – precisely who should be remembered and the rights and wrongs of different wars – have somewhat died down, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine perhaps having mustered new support for the concept of “righteous war”.

As if all this was not diffuse enough, in 2006, the UK began observing a Veterans’ Day in June, which was changed three years later to Armed Forces Day – perhaps to underline the distinction with Remembrance Day. The focus of ceremonies here is the National Memorial Arboretum – near Lichfield, in the centre of the country, it was said, to ease access for visitors from all over the country. Armed Forces Day, however, does not seem to tug at the national heartstrings in the same way as the two-minute silence and the march past the Cenotaph.

And this could point a way forward. The proliferation of events, and the duplication of Armistice Day ceremonial in particular, cry out to be given a single sense of purpose. It may also be that a suitable tipping point has been reached. Those who can remember anything of the last world war are now nudging 90; those who saw service are largely gone. My late father, who was called up as an undergraduate to work at Bletchley Park, would have turned 100 this year.

Yet the cloud of nostalgia persists, and not just at the political level or in the upper echelons of the armed forces. In many families, something akin to a shared myth of war has been passed from generation to generation; the horrors of the trenches in the First World War, and the glory of victory against the odds in the Second. At the same time, the desire to keep memory is now extended to those who died in more recent wars, whether as combatants or civilians.

Why can all these sentiments not be brought together in a single day of remembrance, to be observed on the 11th of the 11th and declared a public holiday, as happens in France? Or, it could be a fixed day of the week, as with Memorial Day in the United States. Either way, the UK could do with a public holiday to punctuate the long autumn, while the spring would hardly suffer for having one fewer.

The familiar ceremony at the Cenotaph would be retained, with the silence and the wreath-laying, and the march-past – but stripped of its religious service, in recognition both of the country’s greater diversity, and the reality that war can come seemingly out of nowhere and make victims of all.

Would such a change attract public support? Might it be opposed by the top brass? By veterans’ associations? By the Anglican Church? Just as it could take a Labour government to reform the National Health Service, so it would probably take a Conservative government to prune the many strands of memorialising that have been added over the years and weave them back into a coherent whole. With the current government running out of time, the prospects look dim. But it is maybe something for everyone to think about during the silence on Sunday after Big Ben strikes 11.