When Sunday comes….

This year Remembrance Sunday falls on Armistice Day itself, which always gives the church service a particularly poignant feel, especially when the names of the dead are read out.

And a few years ago the service at St Patrick’s church in Solihull was given even more meaning by the research of one of the church members, who had been able to find out something about the lives of those who had died for our freedom.

Whenever there is war, service personnel – and those close to them - will ask themselves the question asked in this poem, written by my son James when he was 14 years old.

For England

Men I’ve fought with blown away
Goodbyes I never got to say
The things I suffer every day
For England, For England

A sniper’s bullet in the night
Another day, naught but fright
These things I risk through dark and light
For England, For England

Mud and sewage, rats and mice
Clothes and hair filled with lice
To kill a man and pay no price
For England, For England

Wounded, dying on the floor
Things I never should endure
What am I really fighting for?
For England? For England?

Many of them might have said they were fighting for freedom, for justice, for democracy.

But what kind of freedom and justice?

My continental European friends and colleagues, aware of the UK’s opt out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights in the Treaty of Lisbon, ask me if Britain doesn’t care about human rights? Or even opposes the idea.

Today is a day to remember the dead who fought for what they believed to a just cause – but the question of what they were fighting for is one which deserves an answer and one which I will return to.