THE flags are flying in Faversham, but not the flimsy versions of the Union flag and the St George’s Cross. As soon as these appear the town’s “ninjas” emerge in the night to reclaim the streets with their improvised flag-removing tools.

These new flags are a cheapskate knock-off copy of the British Legion “Lest we forget” design. Provocatively attached to lampposts around the town’s war memorial, these new flags were positioned by Faversham’s fast-diminished and faction-ridden collection of flag-shaggers to provoke the night-time “ninjas” to remove them.

And with Armistice Day ceremonies a week or so away, the cunning plan was to raise a hue and cry about unpatriotic “lefties” disrespecting our fallen heroes if the flags were removed.

When a few weeks ago, Faversham’s poundshop patriots a hijacked the town’s carnival parade with a flag-bedecked armoured car to promote their divisive message they aroused the ire of local veterans.

Now the Royal British Legion has issued a statement insisting the organisation is non-partisan and the sombre occasion this Sunday must not be used for political or ideological purposes. It has been moved to “reaffirm” its position following the incident on carnival day.

A hugely controversial war memorial consisting of huge slabs of stone with the names of Faversham folk who fell in a succession of conflicts since the Great War of 1914-18 sits along side the town’s original memorial. Situated opposite the cottage hospital, the garden, much loved as a place of reflection and repose for years, was tended by a voluntary group of townspeople.

Key figures in the local Establishment were trustees of various funds which were diverted to pay for the new edifices in a controversy, the political fallout of which saw the Tories cleared from the town council. The maintenance of the reconfigured gardens is now a charge on the rates rather than borne by voluntary contributions and the volunteers who tended it are dispersed.

Alarmingly for many, the end slab has a vast white space on which it is presumed the dead of future wars will have their names inscribed.

“Lest we forget” is a powerful call on our collective memory and it is worth looking at how the original impulse to remember the fallen in the first inter-imperialist war of the 20th century has been transformed.

In his book Censorship Overruled — An Alternative History of 1918 (www.manifestopress.coop), John Ellison — familiar to readers of this newspaper — quotes two sources that told of the immense human cost of the war and the political cost that this entailed.

The diary of Thomas Jones, Assistant Cabinet Secretary dated January 9 1918, notes: “Labour can stop the war, if it chooses, and knows that it can do so.”

And anti-war Labour MP William Anderson writing in The Herald on January 5 1918: “In newspapers, clubs, railway carriages, in the City, one hears today the whisper of revolution.”

In my home town of Luton, Peace Day unrest in 1919 resulted in a widespread riot, with first world war veterans burning down the town hall to give voice to their grievances about unemployment and poverty.

In the intervening years until 1926 — the year of the General Strike — a two-minute silence was held on November 11, the anniversary of the day the guns fell silent. Red poppy emblems — recalling the sea of poppies which sprung up where shellfire had turned over the Flanders earth and buried the dead and dying — proved popular.

A July 10 1919 letter to the Manchester Evening News summed up the feelings of many ex-servicemen: “Sir, I am sure the title Peace Day will send a cold shiver through the bodies of thousands of ‘demobbed’ men who are walking about the streets of Manchester looking for a job. Could a term be found that would be more ironical for such men. Perhaps, after the Manchester and Salford Corporations have celebrated this ‘peace’ and incidentally will have wasted the thousands of pounds which it will cost, they will devote their spare time to alleviating the ‘bitterness’ and ‘misery’ which exist in the body and mind of the unemployed ex-soldier.”

The ruling class and its mass media, church and the Establishment worked hard to channel anger at post-war realities into a remembrance culture that sanctified the casualties of empire and homeland.

The Cenotaph was designed by Edwin Lutyens as an explicit celebration of imperial power and the sacrifices this entailed and controversies over its meaning and significance, and of Lutyens’ own politics, continue.

Of course, Peace Day did not see the end of conflict. British forces intervened unsuccessfully to defeat the Russian Revolution. Much fighting took place as the peoples of the empire, especially India and Iraq, fought against the British military. Infamously the RAF used chemical warfare against the Iraqis.

If the first world war was widely seen as a conflict between competing imperialisms and lacked legitimacy to all except empire loyalists, the second world war, when it eventually and explicitly acquired an unambiguous anti-fascist character, drew on a wave of patriotic and progressive appeal, shot through with a temporary and one-sided diminution of class hostilities.

It is the last war in which British soldiers sailors and aircrew fought in a morally justifiable cause.

There are fewer than 5,000 surviving British veterans of the war which saw our country, united with the Soviet Union, China, France and the United States against the fascist powers and by the end of this decade they will live only as memories.

Declassified UK records that since the end of WWII Britain has used or threatened to use its military force 83 times in 47 different countries, including our nearest neighbour Ireland.

These included armed bids to overthrow governments, including the war against Korea, the 1953 overthrow of the Cheddi Jagan’s left-wing government in Guyana, operations against Egypt, including the Suez war alongside France and Israel, the 2003 Iraq war, the 2011 attack on Libya, the invasion of Afghanistan and prolonged wars to suppress anti-colonial movements in Indochina, Kenya, Malaya, Yemen and Cyprus.

And in support of the dependent regimes of Oman (1957), Malawi (1959), Brunei (1962), Anguilla (1969) and Jordan (1970) British forces were despatched to suppress popular revolts.

In 1964 British military forces were deployed to suppress army mutinies in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania as these colonial states became nominally independent.

There is no way to fully account for covert military and intelligence-led operations, but we know that the infiltration of anti-communist elements into post-war socialist countries, including Albania, Ukraine and the Baltic states, failed and MI6/CIA covert intervention took place in Indonesia (where a million local communists were murdered) and in Yemen in the 1960s.

Lest we forget the lives of 997,000 British service personnel were wasted in the 1914-18 war.

The 384,000 who died in the second world war, with civilian casualties numbering around 70,000, fell in a war that is judged as morally justified by all except fascists and those elements in the British ruling class — before and after the war — who schemed for a joint British Nazi assault on the Soviet Union.

Following the Nazi surrender, and even as the war continued in Asia, plans were afoot to roll back the Soviet advance which liberated much of Europe. The National Archives include a report from the British military leaders to prime minister Winston Churchill on the chances of “Operation Unthinkable” — a surprise attack on the USSR, May 22 1945 (Catalogue ref: CAB 120/691).

The document records states: “The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire” and sets July 1 1945 as the start date, while “Great Britain and the United States have full assistance from the Polish armed forces and can count upon the use of German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity.”

The analysis by the Joint Planning Staff of the chances of success were starkly put and Churchill was forced to abandon the idea.

Lest we forget, the casualties of all wars deserve to be remembered, but remembered differently.

We remember all the victims of the great inter-imperialist war of 1914-18 as victims of capitalist rivalry for markets and profits. We remember the casualties of the second world war as fallen in the service of humanity to defeat fascism and we remember the casualties of each post-1945 conflict as fallen in the service of private profit and imperial power.

If Labour in opposition in 1918 could have stopped the war, how much more so is it in 2025 when Labour is in government? But the Labour Party is as wedded to imperial power as much today as it was in the 20th century.

In February Keir Starmer set out his commitment to increase spending on defence to 2.5 per cent of GDP from April 2027. This planned to rise to 3 per cent of GDP with a commitment to the biggest investment in defence spending since the cold war “as the UK enters era of intensifying geopolitical competition and conflict.”

But there is an alternative to war preparations. As the Irish have demonstrated with the victory won by Catherine Connolly in their presidential election — with an overwhelming majority over her pro-Nato opponents — neutrality is an alternative to the war dance of Nato and the European Union.

In a world where economic and political power is shifting it makes sense to opt out of the war game. Our islands off the coast of the Eurasian mainland can set an example for peace.