 This Sunday you'll see Britons great and good gathering Whitehall at the Cenotaph but there's something wrong with Remembrance. We need to talk about what Remembrance shouldn't be. Remembrance shouldn't be about poppy shaped cheese or children holding giant poppies in future soldier t-shirts. It shouldn't be about dancing poppy costumes. It shouldn't be about the Royal British Legion throwing its lot in with arms firms like BAE Systems who now sponsor and are essentially involved in Remembrance. Remembrance shouldn't be used as a means to crush dissent and we see that increasingly particularly over the last 10 years where people are attacked for a criticising tone of Remembrance even for not wearing poppies, particularly people in the public eye. Some people claim Remembrance isn't political but of course it's highly political. There's nothing more political than war and if we're going to take it seriously and really be respectful to the people who've died in wars it should be a space for questioning war and why we go to war. We also need to talk about what Remembrance can be and should be and that's an opportunity to reject the current idea that when we talk about conflicts we narrow it to our own dead. It's just our dead who matter. We need to talk about all the victims of war particularly in modern wars when the majority of victims are civilians who look at Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and places like this. The vast majority of victims aren't a military personnel. They're innocent people who are caught up in these wars which have been imposed on them and so if we're going to be really serious about Remembrance and respectful of history, our history in the world in particular we need to include all the dead on all sides whether they're Germans or Iraqis or Libyans or Afghans or whoever they may be. So if you look at the people who own Remembrance, politically own it and have agency over it, then you're talking about the same people who probably benefit from the wars. You're talking about the editors of major right wing newspapers Murdoch, Daker and so on. When you look at the people who are featured in the main event you're looking at the Queen, you're looking at Tony Blair turns up every year without fail, you're looking at David Cameron, other past prime ministers with a warmongering history. It's an opportunity, it's an opportunity to reclaim Remembrance in some sense. You will never see generals on that parade but you'll never see your average soldier and you'll never see an Iraqi who's been displaced or an Afghan who's been displaced. When I go to Remembrance I march with Veterans for Peace who are an ex-services organisation. We have members who are there on D-Day and we have people who are in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and as veterans we feel an obligation to reject the militaristic narrative and question what we've been involved in and try and rescue Remembrance and bring it back to what the original soldiers, the original World War I veterans, their ideas, the idea of never again, that was the central idea of Remembrance a hundred years ago and after World War I, that there would never be another war like this and we would seriously consider how Britain for example operates in the world and seriously consider the impacts that warfare has on people all over the world. So if you want to remember this armistice day, remember never again.