At 9am today, BBC newsreader Nicholas Owen read out the headlines with the words “The Queen will lead the Remembrance Sunday celebrations – commemorations – at the Cenotaph this morning”. He was right the first time, of course.

The day’s edition of Breakfast had just run footage of the “Festival Of Remembrance” the previous evening at the Royal Albert Hall, focusing on a segment that illustrated starkly what the poppy has come to symbolise in recent years – not a sombre tribute to the flower of a wasted youth slaughtered on the battlefields of France and Belgium, but a jingoistic, sentimental lionisation of Our Brave Boys and a recruiting campaign for the modern-day army the UK government sends abroad to shoot brown people who have committed no aggression against Britain and pose no threat to it.

It happened in the same week a Royal Marine was convicted of murdering a wounded, defenceless prisoner in cold blood while his comrades stood by, watched, then hid the evidence and lied to investigators, and where after the verdict a senior general called for the killer to serve just five years in prison. But we’ll leave all that to one side.

Last night’s event saw the “Poppy Girls” singing group, made up of the daughters of servicemen, perform their saccharine fundraising single “The Call – No Need To Say Goodbye”, with a solo by 10-year-old Megan Adams.

Kitted out with a giant microphone to emphasise her tiny size, the little girl gave a superb performance, and the group was lined up in the middle of the vast arena while the BBC’s Huw Edwards took to the rostrum with a surprise announcement.

Against a shimmering electronic background of poppies, Edwards turned the moment into something straight out of Cilla Black’s old Saturday-night ITV show “Surprise Surprise”. Hamming it up for all he was worth, he informed the crowd that Megan’s dad, Lieutenant Commander Billy Adams couldn’t be there to see her sing, because he was serving in the Indian Ocean and wasn’t due home for three months.

Right on cue, the cameras duly zoomed into a close-up of the child’s face as if viewers were watching an episode of The X-Factor, showing every detail of her emotions as what was about to happen became clear.

Sure enough, Edwards broke the shock that Megan’s father WAS here after all, flown back specially to walk proudly down the steps in his full dress uniform. The wee lassie reacted as any wee lassie would in the circumstances – tearfully (and photogenically) rushing across the arena floor to greet her dad.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house as father and daughter met and embraced, surrounded from every angle and in every shot by more flickering electronic poppies, glowing from every available surface in the hall.

We don’t begrudge for a second the joyful reunion of a father and his child. But Lt Cmdr Adams hadn’t been in harm’s way, and his separation from Megan was entirely of his own choosing. He hadn’t been conscripted and sent off, barely-trained, to walk slowly into machine-gun fire, so we’re not too sure what this carefully-choreographed and stage-managed event had to do with a symbol that was meant to remind people of the terrible, wasteful sacrifice of the dead.

Just over four years ago, the last man in Britain who saw that sacrifice first-hand died. Harry Patch, who fought at Passchendaele and many of the other killing fields of WW1, had no truck with the glorification of war. His view on the subject, expressed bitterly until his dying day, closely echoes that of this site:

That doesn’t happen, of course. Instead those politicians use events like the unashamedly-named “Festival Of Remembrance” to portray war as a noble pursuit of heroes. They use the carnage of the Somme and Ypres and the Marne – where enlisted Scots and Welshmen and Irishmen and Englishmen were mown down together (along with men of countless other nations who’d never set foot in Great Britain) by the undiscriminating guns of the Germans – to celebrate “Britishness” and serve a nakedly political agenda.

This sick perversion of “remembrance” hasn’t just been noticed by chippy Scottish nationalists (who particularly note the transparent, cynical, unimaginably tacky £50m jamboree planned for just before the independence referendum rather than on the day in November that has served for the last 96 years). Many others, including those who served in the even worse war that followed, see what has become of it.

Last night’s stomach-churning exploitation of a young girl’s love for her daddy wasn’t even a new low. Considerably uglier depths than that had been plumbed just a few weeks earlier in Glasgow.

But Ibrox Stadium, with its songs of “Fenian blood” and bloody imperial rule, is no place for faint hearts and delicate sensitivities. The Royal Albert Hall, in front of the Queen and millions of TV viewers, ought perhaps to still be a little more tasteful than an episode of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.

We suspect that the only memorial most of the dead of the “Great War” would have wanted was the knowledge that their country’s leaders would be more reluctant in future to send their nations’ youth to their deaths. Like Jeremy Paxman, Robert Fisk and many others, we want nothing to do with the grand, fetishistic celebration of “patriotic” killing that’s being served up instead, at the same time as actual veterans are being thrown onto the streets by welfare “reforms”.

Yesterday we walked through town with a clicker. We counted 610 adults, of whom just 37 were wearing poppies. When we mentioned it on Twitter, many people told us they were happy to donate to the Haig Fund which looks after ex-servicemen and their families, but would not wear the poppy that is the organisation’s emblem.

It seems we’re not alone in thinking the UK’s politicians are a disgrace to the dead.