Get your Progress Pride poppy

Have you ever wanted to signal your commitment to veterans and your undying allegiance to trans ideology? Well now, for just eight British pounds, you can purchase your very own Progress Pride poppy pin, just in time for Remembrance Day.

The badge, sold by the Royal British Legion (RBL), features the traditional red remembrance poppy, attached to the ubiquitous eyesore that is the Progress Pride flag. This is the flag that includes not only the standard gay-rights rainbow, but also the trans flag, the intersex flag (yes, they both have flags now) and two black and brown stripes, apparently to represent ethnic minorities.

This new pin has struck many people online as a strange move, given that the primary purpose of the RBL is to support veterans, current service members and their families – not to wade into contentious cultural debates about sex and gender. Plus, it’s not as if we have needed different poppies for different identities before this.

Nevertheless, it seems every institution must now signal its fealty to woke ideology at every possible opportunity. Indeed, earlier this year, the RBL was also caught advertising for a new head of diversity and inclusion, to ensure DEI ideology ‘is woven into everything we do’. Nice work if you can get it.

If you’re wondering, it turns out that the RBL is also – obviously – a member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions. This scheme, run by the largely discredited gender-ideology charity, costs organisations £3,000 each year to belong to. It bills itself as ‘the gold standard for LGBTQ+ inclusion’ and aims to ‘make LGBTQ+ people feel safe and encouraged in the workplace’.

While this might all sound fine on the face of it, the scheme has been widely accused of mainlining controversial ideas about gender into charities and the corporate world – all by rewarding adherence to trans ideology in its workplace rankings and downgrading firms keen to protect sex-based rights.

(Following an online backlash this week, the Diversity Champions section of the RBL’s website has mysteriously disappeared, for now.)

The woke turn of the Royal British Legion – now those are words I never thought I’d write – suggests that no big organisation, no matter how singular in its mission, is capable of resisting the lure of identitarian self-righteousness.

I dare say this isn’t what many veterans, or the elderly volunteers selling poppies on street corners, signed up for.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.