BY DANIEL JUPP

I was fortunate enough to be in the oldest church in the City of London at the 11th hour on Remembrance Sunday, All Hallows by the Tower. There’s been a church there since 675 AD.

It was touching to be in such a setting at such a moment but there were only six people there.

We all observed the silence.

Words of remembrance were spoken just before and just after.

I looked at row after row of empty pews.

In the crypt below there is a section of Roman flooring. There is a memorial to William Penn (from whom comes ‘Pennsylvania’). There is a thousand-year-old circular Saxon cross.

We Brits are blessed with so much history.

Just over a century ago we started commemorating the bravest and the best who gave their lives for the rest of us with a moment of silence and a moment of thought, with a poppy and a prayer.

Such a little thank you for the ultimate sacrifice there is.

Those pews should be packed. Every head should be bowed. There shouldn’t be a car moving or a word said. There shouldn’t be a single idiot scorning the poppy or oblivious to that moment.

We said we would remember for eternity. Not just the soldiers and the sailors, the airmen and the warriors. All of them.

How many churches are always empty? How many graves are never visited?

Perhaps much of what we have become is due to a reduced awareness and respect for what we were.

It is so sad to see the emptiness, and know that it is a reflection of our emptiness and complete turning away from the things that made us who we are.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex.