Country doesn’t need Kitchener’s face on £2 coin

LORD Kitchener, the great first World War recruiter, is to be the new face of the £2 coin.

Like so many of the statues of military men to be found around Westminster, Kitchener is a reminder of the days of industrial warfare and of the military and political leaders who made huge blunders costing millions of lives.

This was a case of “lions led by donkeys”, as has been described by several historians of the war.

Shouldn’t 2014 be about remembering the monumental folly of war? A different, progressive choice for the £2 coin could have been a war poet, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon. Or better still, Vera Brittain, showing the female side of service and loss and working for a better world. Or perhaps the man who really had the last word: Harry Patch.

Instead they chose Kitchener – a man whose driving force was putting a million men more in the field than the enemy – knowing they were machine gun fodder and regardless of how many came back.

We really ought to be commemorating the end of the war, not the beginning.