"Remembrance" is a sensitive subject. Workers' Liberty, the group which publishes Tubeworker, has been critical of the official discourse of remembrance, which glorifies war and the colonial projects for which working-class men and women were sent to die in conflicts like World War One. How we remember wars, and those who fought and died in them, is not somewhat above or outside politics: we can sympathise with the suffering, and sometimes the sacrifice, of the war dead without tacitly supporting militarism, nationalism, or imperialism.
We think the ubiquity of official "remembrance" discourses, and the atmosphere they create in which anyone with a different perspective is made to feel like a traitor, or that they should have to apologise for not wearing a poppy, is undemocratic.
(For more on these issues, see here).
But, whatever you think about "remembrance", we can surely all agree that the incessant celebrity PAs with which we and our customers are being bombarded are not helpful. The worst, surely, is the one from the guy who does the voiceovers on X Factor, announcing himself at great volume in his trademark X Factor style, in an announcement that hardly encourages us to reflect on the horrors of war.
There's something vaguely Orwellian about the voiceover guy from the X Factor being piped into our workplaces and modes of public transport telling us all to buy poppies.