Seamus Logan: There's much to think about this Remembrance Sunday

After a very moving and poignant service, I had the honour of planting a cross on behalf of my constituents in the “Constituency Garden of Remembrance”.

This solemn moment was at the start of a week in Westminster during which I heard and witnessed many things that have made me think deeply about our annual acts of remembrance.

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Events in Sudan were the subject of an urgent question in the House of Commons and then again during Prime Minister’s Questions. The devastating war there continues to rage. Recently the slaughter and atrocities have intensified, including large-scale sexual violence against women.

Meanwhile, the bodies of innocent children, women and men continue to pile up in Gaza and Lebanon.

My colleague Brendan O’Hara, MP for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber, recently asked the Foreign Secretary if there was any “red line that the government of Israel could cross that would lead to an end of arms shipments from the UK?”

Predictably, he didn’t get any kind of meaningful answer.

And because of this approach by the UK and other Western governments, the wanton death and destruction will continue at the hands of an Israeli government which has been given no reason by its allies as yet to fear the consequences of its actions.

In both examples, Westminster continued to do what it does “best”. MPs discussed these horrific events, they put their questions to ministers, action was demanded of the Government and we all hoisted the flags of our political differences.

However, I doubt that minds were being changed or that the UK Government suddenly became fearful of public opinion in relation to its actions – I fear that none of it will make any difference to anything the UK Government plans to do, or in these cases, to not do.

During the evening as we walked through central London, my wife and I counted dozens of rough sleepers within 10 minutes of the House of Commons, where a Labour MP claimed this week that the rough sleeping problem is now “worse than ever”.

This has subsequently been confirmed with around 4500 rough sleepers each night, the highest number recorded – and we are now in November! The gulf between those with plenty and those in poverty has always been with us.

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However, the chasm between the glitz and show of central London, and the reality of the bodies huddled in doorways under the “protection” of cardboard and sleeping bags, really is about as stark as it gets anywhere.

Two of my uncles, my father’s brothers, fought in the Pacific for the US Navy during the Second World War. So many young Scots made the ultimate sacrifice, like my wife’s three great uncles; brothers who were lost at Gallipoli, Ypres and the Somme in the First World War.

And I do mean lost – their remains were never found and able to be returned to Fraserburgh. Their graves in the town cemetery lie empty.

Their personal sacrifice is over. Yet how many of these homeless men and women will be military veterans? How many are still making a sacrifice – now their service is over – in terms of their physical and mental wellbeing?

How many, if given the opportunity, would march past the Cenotaph demanding action now from the same political leaders who will solemnly lay their wreaths on our and their behalf while pledging that “we will remember”?

You don’t have to go back too many years to recall political leaders – like Heath or Healey – who had seen active service in armed conflict; who genuinely knew of the realities of war and what it meant to ask young men and women to lay their lives on the line.

It’s telling that the generation of political and opposition leaders who led us to the folly of Iraq had no similar experience of military service, and were doubtless more psychologically removed from their words and actions, and therefore all the more gung-ho, jingoistic and reckless as to the eventual outcomes which resulted.

Some of that generation of service personnel have now themselves entered politics. Many are still finding their feet and therefore their voice. When they do, I hope it is to raise it not to speak of former rank or of their pride, however justified they might be in so doing.

Rather, I hope it is to speak the unvarnished truth of what they have seen; to speak of and for those who were affected for good or for ill by what it was they were asked to do; and to remind us of our ongoing obligations for our actions to those who wore a uniform in the service of their country once they are back in civilian life.

This weekend, we will all come together on Remembrance Sunday and remember those who were lost in all the conflicts of the past. What troubles me is that we, the people, seem powerless to stop the horrors of war in the present while in the midst of remembering those same horrors in the past. We don’t learn the lessons.

This weekend, these are the things that will be on my mind as I lay a wreath and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

It will harden my resolve to do more to solve the problems of the present. We cannot change the past but we can sure as hell change our future for the better.