IN THE last month alone there have been anti-militarist protests in at least four British universities. Students at Warwick, Sheffield, Lancaster and Nottingham have challenged their universities’ links with the arms trade.

With British military spending passing £50 billion in 2021, and likely to increase even further, young people are reacting in anger. The post-Covid world has rejected the presumption that young people are apathetic and don’t care about politics.

Rather, we are globally conscious citizens. This year, in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday, we should wear white poppies as a symbol of remembrance and rebellion and support for issues we care about. 

White poppies remember victims of war of all nationalities as well as showing a commitment to peace and highlighting the urgency of our ongoing struggle for a fairer, just and peaceful future.

Such issues range from hurricanes in Canada and the US to floods in Pakistan. From Palestine and Gaza to Ukraine and Russia — white poppies challenge militarism. An ideology rooted in an exploitative system of colonialism and neoliberalism.

The same students at these university protests have also been involved in climate strikes. Inspired by the likes of Greta Thunberg, activist front-liners for climate justice like Fridays For Future Scotland and Extinction Rebellion are made of young people. 

They are demonstrating what non-violent resistance can achieve.

While issues of sustainability are at the forefront of young Westerners’ minds, campaigning against war in countries destroyed by violence and conflict (most which were historically colonised) should be a priority.

Since wars pollute the environment, it is a step towards decolonising climate justice.

Furthermore, as Europe has seen with the war in Ukraine, wars bring problems of energy security. This means that issues of sustainable energy use are pushed aside. War and climate change fuel each other.

The new environmental design for white poppies is a commitment to peace and the environment. 

Wearing a white poppy pressures and holds governments and corporations to account, to take real decolonising action for climate justice and peace.

Clearly, we cannot expect to live in a sustainable world without peace. As we campaign for alternative sustainable developments, we must also campaign for an alternative understanding of peace and militarism.

Musician Lowkey and poet Benjamin Zephaniah, both of whom have endorsed the white poppy, have been forceful and influential alternative voices of rebellion in Britain, raising awareness of the effects of colonialism among young people. 

With the Home Secretary’s most recent controversial claim that Britain was being subjected to an “invasion” by asylum-seekers, a decolonisation of war is needed. 

White poppies support decolonising remembrance, by remembering those who are often excluded from the mainstream, such as refugees and victims of colonial conflicts.

Furthermore, the effects of war are also closely linked with poverty. In Britain oil and gas prices have surged since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, while one in five children in Britain were already experiencing fuel poverty in 2020. 

Young people today are poorer than young people of the past, a report by the World Economic Forum has shown, yet British government cuts, tax and spending priorities have called on the young to sacrifice even more.

Slashes to the welfare state have further plunged young people into a deep cost-of-living crisis, of declining wages, higher taxes and rising house prices, while maintaining the fourth-highest military budget in the world.

Faced with injustice and insecurity, wearing a white poppy challenges the prioritisation, normalisation and justification of militarism, and how it exploits young people.

For instance, in recent years there has been a sharp rise in military involvement with school education in Britain and their targeting of underprivileged young people. 

The armed forces argue that they provide underprivileged teenagers with a route out of unemployment, but since four-fifths of disadvantaged teenagers now continue in school or college from age 16, their enlistment typically brings their full-time education to an early end.

An army document leaked in 2017 makes clear that the army is deliberately targeting the poorest young people for recruitment.

The document stated that their target recruit was “16-24, primarily C2DE. Mean household income 10k.”

Young people have long been on the receiving end of Herbert Kitchener’s pointing finger, but will the government help the 90 per cent of schools and colleges that will run out of money next year? 

Casualties of cuts are once again the most deprived, vulnerable communities.

Coupled with rising tuition fees, it seems that the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against young people. Over 10 years ago, thousands of students protested against the government’s plans for a rise in intuition fees. 

Now, several vice-chancellors including those at Bristol and Sunderland are calling for increases in domestic tuition fees to keep “universities running,” while Bristol receives £6.5 million in military funding.

An analysis of 16 Russell Group universities showed that direct British government military funding totalled £23.6m from 2008-11.

Students at the University of Sheffield, who last week occupied the engineering building in protest against the universities’ links with Rolls-Royce (which granted the university £11.1m in 2008-11) and BAE Systems, wore white poppies while doing so.

Some were members of the Peace Pledge Union. Their demands? To sit down and talk to the vice-chancellor about this funding. Instead, the university authorities went to court to have them forcibly evicted. The vice-chancellor had refused to meet them.

So as, as a demographic, young people have become poorer we simultaneously become the most vulnerable in society. Vulnerable to militarism, poverty and climate change.

The struggles for justice and peace are interlinked. As the nature of remembrance changes, this year, remember all the victims of war, including civilians of all nationalities killed in wars happening now, in defiance of our government that profits from an arms trade that has supplied human right abusers with £17bn worth of weapons. 

The struggles for justice and peace are interlinked. This year wear a white poppy for justice and peace.

Nadya Lovadinov is an intern at the Peace Pledge Union (www.ppu.org.uk).