UK court jails thrower of remembrance poppies for vandalism
A court in the United Kingdom has jailed a homeless man because he had thrown away poppies used to remember wars Britain has contributed to.
The magistrates in Wiltshire, in southern England, ruled that Ashwani Kumar, 54, should spend eight weeks in jail for disrespecting the remembrance poppies that had been put on a war memorial in Swindon.
Police had described the act of throwing the wreaths of poppies around Cenotaph War Memorial in Regent Circus last weekend as “a total disgrace”, saying it was an act of vandalism. Local media also condemned the move, saying it had caused a “huge amount of upset" in the local community”.
However, the imprisonment comes as many in the UK are opposed to the use of poppies and even campaign against it, arguing it is an instrument for cleansing Britain’s history of contribution to brutal wars.
Anti-poppy campaigners also believe that the remembrance object is dubiously used by politicians to sell wars, like those contributed by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Poppy critics even say that forcing people to wear remembrance poppies is a form of fascism while others say that cultivating poppies has become a huge business in Britain with only a factory in south-west London producing over 50 million poppies each year to supply the market.
In November, a taxi company in Birmingham said it had fired a driver because he had refused to transfer boxes of poppies to a stadium in the city. The company justified its move by saying that the personal decision by the driver had caused “huge public outrage”.
A few days later a political activist who had deplored the increasing costs of Poppy Appeal became subject of a coordinated attack in the British tabloid media. Aaron Bastani, a leftist journalist believed to be close to Labour Party leadership, had slammed the whopping costs of production and distribution of poppies in Britain, saying the Royal British Legion, which is in charge of the Poppy Appeal, was a “grotesque” charity and had to be shut down.
It was not clear whether the homeless man arrested over Swindon poppy throwing was a former soldier or not. Reports over the past months have shown that a growing number of war veterans in the UK have become homeless as a result of government austerity programs.
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