Isabel Oakeshott takes on the Royal British Legion

Of all the people you’d expect hard right activist Isabel Oakeshott to be targeting, Rats didn’t have veterans’ charity the Royal British Legion on our bingo card.

Yet, here she is this morning – discouraging her newsletter readers from buying a poppy in the run-up to this year’s Remembrance Sunday.

The reason for her boycotting the charity that raises almost £40m a year in support of the armed forces community? The RBL has, she spits, “fully signed up to the whole diversity and inclusion agenda”.

This is, clearly, at odds with the very overt non-diversity and non-inclusion agenda promoted by her partner Richard Tice and his master Nigel Farage. The British Legion has, this year, issued special Royal British Legion Pride Poppies featuring, in Oakeshott’s words, “those bewildering circles and triangles”.

“I don’t recall seeing any of those shapes or colours on images of battlefields,” she adds.

Maybe not. But the Third Reich put plenty of those shapes and colours on the prison uniforms of persecuted homosexuals as they processed them in concentration camps. Around 100,000 were arrested by the Nazis and prosecuted.

Thousands were exterminated in concentration camps, identified as gay by the pink triangles they were forced to wear on their prison uniforms. It was these pink triangles that were adopted by the LGBT+ community – turning a symbol of shame into one of pride – by gay activists in Miami in 1977.

Imagine being the person whose hot take on the RBL (an organisation set up after WWI that supported the families of the men and women who fought the Nazis) using that reclaimed symbol in their remembrance of the kind of atrocities Britain fought against is that they should be cancelled!