Brexiteers are making Fifa’s point for them by politicising the poppy

It isn’t hard to see the subtext: Fifa and the EU, they’re just the same. They’re trying to do our proud nation down. Let’s get rid of the lot of them!

Leave.EU founder and Ukip donor Arron Banks (Parliament TV)

If you weren’t previously aware that the EU was responsible for all Britain’s ills you certainly are now. But its latest perfidy will take some topping.

Those twisted Brussels bureaucrats have only tried to ban the poppy! They want to stop England and Scotland players from paying their respects to their nation’s war dead by wearing the hallowed symbol during their Remembrance Weekend Wembley clash. The swines! The devils! The dastardly, dirty, rotten rotters.

What’s that I hear you say? It was Fifa that said England and Scotland players will be in breach of its rules if they wear poppy armbands having branded it as a political symbol? You’re telling me football’s world governing body doesn’t have anything to do with the European Union? That it is, in fact, based in a country, Switzerland, that isn’t even a member? And is seen by some Brexiteers as a model for our future relationship with the bloc?

Of course, I jest. Yet the above seems to be the narrative that Leave.EU is trying to put about. For those who’ve not been formally introduced, they are the well-funded outriders that did the official Leave campaign a favour by doing lots of the nasty stuff in the process of out spending it, with the help of the millions supplied by insurance man Arron Banks.

“Lift the Poppy Ban, Fifa! Let Us Honour Our War Dead,” Leave.EU said, over a collage of the home nations’ flags with a poppy in the left hand corner and the Leave.EU logo in the bottom right.

“We are delighted to hear the FA have decided to defy Fifa by having the England football team wear poppies on Armistice Day. Well done for rejecting political correctness and honouring our war heroes in the appropriate way,” a later statement on the same subject read.

It isn’t hard to see the subtext: Fifa and the EU, they’re just the same. They’re trying to do our proud nation down. Let’s get rid of the lot of them!

“We respect other countries, they should respect us,” fulminated one of those who commented on its post, amid the predictable stream of bile below the line. Except that, of course, we don’t. As the depressing spectacle of fans booing when their anthems are played at Wembley amply demonstrates.

Leave.EU’s cynical intervention has less to do with respecting service personal than it does with encouraging the sort of angry and paranoid nationalism it stoked to help it win a deeply divisive EU referendum of which it was the most divisive part.

Its attempt to hang on to the coattails of the poppy debate is all about politics and by wading into it is politicising what should be an apolitical symbol. Irony, it seems, is dead in Britain right now, otherwise someone at Leave.EU might have seen the irony in its intervention making Fifa’s case for it.

I buy one of those rather nice metal poppy badges they make every year – they’re pricier than the paper poppies but I can never get the latter to stay on my lapel. However, this year I’m starting to wonder whether I want to because I don’t want to wear anything associated with Leave.EU, or its sentiments, in any way.

I know for certain my grandfather wouldn’t have. He fought his way up through the “tough old gut” of Italy. He participated in the Battle of Monte Cassio. He was in combat zones at an age when Arron Banks was on his way to making millions in the City, having been kicked out of his public school.

After the war my grandfather went back to Italy, learned German from the television, and passionately believed that the two nations should be friends. He would have been appalled at the place our country has become.

Leave.EU is disrespecting his service and his memory with its attempt to politicise the poppy. Not all service personnel, or ex service personnel, are Brexiteers. Not all those who want to honour the nation’s war dead are Brexiteers. The angry snarl of extreme Brexiteers can be frighteningly reminiscent of what British troops fought against in the Second World War my late grandfather was a veteran of. The attempt to take ownership of the poppy by Leave.EU is shameful. It’s not just Fifa that should get its hands off the poppy.