Remembrance of things past can be a British burden. As each year passes the memory distorts, rewrites and reshapes wars to suit our current moods and needs: history is usefully pliable. As Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day approach, this is a good time to consider how long we should go on remembering. What is real meaning?

Last year, the centenary of the end of the first world war was intensely moving. In some towns young men dressed in uniforms stood gravely outside the houses where a father or son had gone to the trenches, never to return. The mass cascade of poppies first installed at the Tower of London in 2014 to mark the centenary of the beginning of the war has been travelling the country ever since. It came to a final stop in November last year outside the Imperial War Museum’s London and Manchester locations: powerful symbols of sacrifice and loss.

Most families have tales to tell of grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ roles in both wars – word-of-mouth and family lore passed down the generations – but often coming with handed-down distortions. Memory doesn’t last long: few families know of ancestors defending us from Napoleon, or fallen in Crimea or the Boer war. There is little memory even of Korea or Malaya. As real memory fades, it is time all this artificial memorialising was laid to rest.

There has been an explosion of mainly unwelcome war films and TV series: every great actor vying to do their Churchill

Some see all this remembrance as a necessary pacifist reminder of the merciless futility of unlovely war. Others see it as a patriotic rallying cry to sacrifice for crown and country, with Guides and Scouts marching through towns with flags. Curiously, there seems to be more emphasis on all this nowadays than there was when I was young, when the wars were more recent and memories personally painful.

The iron rule that everyone must wear a poppy in TV studios is a recent imposition: producers dash in to pin one on any guest remiss enough to have left theirs on their coat in the green room. There has been an explosion of mainly unwelcome war films and TV series: every great actor vying to do their Churchill, non-stop archive footage rehashes, Dunkirk epics, our finest hour rehearsed too many times in a sentimental London fog and the rosy glow of mistily rubbish history.

It’s fine to shake tins for veterans – but surely last year was the time to say goodbye to all that, to look ahead not back.

The ultimate remembrance absurdity was the 2004 erection in Park Lane of a maudlin war memorial to animals, engraved: “This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time.” No, they didn’t “serve”. Why not put up a memorial to all animals who have been served up on dinner plates to sustain us “throughout time”?

What Remembrance Sunday all too often signifies is this: “Never forget that we won two world wars”, while conveniently forgetting that victory required the greater heft of US and Russian allies. The golden age of history is always just before our own living memory, a better yesterday. That lies at the root of a Brexitism that needs to remember it was us alone against “them” across the Channel. The prime purpose of the founders of the European Union was “never again”. Yet somehow the Brexiteers managed to turn all that on its head, making trade wars, followed by actual war, no longer completely unimaginable. How might that happen? The sinking of fishing boats, accusations of unfair subsidies and dumping, of protectionism and hostile barring of a neighbour’s exports? That’s how it starts.

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Giving a talk this week, the contemporary historian Anthony Seldon said too much remembrance was holding us back. Look how losing wars had forced Germany and Japan to rethink their identity and their past to create for themselves a new future, while Britain, the victor, wallowed in its old triumphs, forever pulled backwards. Dreams of lost empire were enmeshed in those victories: too little is taught of the dark side of colonialism, of slavery and the wealth built from it – instead there is harping on about the anti-slave abolitionists.

These words of wisdom come from a man who, as historical adviser to No 10, was a leading member of the first world war centenary culture committee. That committee did well, but last year should have finally laid to rest all this empty, vainglorious, false-memory memorialising.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist