Sadly Harry Leslie Smith died late last year in his mid-90s.
But his wise words live on. He would love Labour's manifesto 2019.
I want to pay tribute to Harry in these blogs by quoting from his last book 'Don't Let My Past Be Your Future.'
' ...when Theresa May, during her 2017 New Year’s address to the nation, spoke about bringing more social equality to Britain, I didn’t believe her. 'Cobblers,’ I said to myself. Our present government is too obsessed by Brexit, third runways at Heathrow or grammar schools to tackle the root causes of all societies misfortunes. This present day Tory administration is as horribly and dangerously separated from the needs of the people as their party was in the early 20th century. But back then my generation did have one advantage over today’s dispossessed; we knew the enemy to our success wasn’t the unionised worker but those who sought to never pay a decent wage to their employees. We knew our enemies were politicians and governments that sought to maintain their privileges over the interests of the common people.
It’s like colourblindness, but many today don’t see that their political enemies are those at the top, not those suit well down below them...
It wasn’t that I didn’t realise that Hitler was evil – anybody who watched the newsreels or read the newspapers could see that. It’s just his nefariousness didn’t seem to excuse the manner in which Britain treated the working class, the poor and the vulnerable. Much later on in the war, when I was in Europe, I was shocked to see that most working class neighbourhoods in Belgium and Holland were luxurious compared to the squalor workers were expected to call home in Britain. These places abroad even had indoor toilets, where as we at home scrambled outside no matter the weather to do our business like animals. I thought if those countries could afford to treat their workers with more respect than ours, a mighty empire, then it meant our leaders of the league really wanted us to be subjugated...
Those who controlled believers of society have not shared the burden of austerity they imposed upon the country during the great depression. It seems also similar to today’s crisis of faith in government. Many feel in this day and age that, while institutions like the NHS are within a hair’s breadth of insolvency because of underfunding, they are bearing the brunt of Tory austerity without any recompense. And they are not wrong because even under austerity British executives make so much more than the average worker. Yet during the Second World War, to offset perceptions of a half and have not society, the wartime government imposed an income tax of 95% on top earners so that it would at least appear that they could not profit...
Today, politicians from all sides of the House of Commons need to create a new Beveridge Report for the 21st-century that addresses the great divide that now separate the top 10% of wage earners from everyone else. It must look at ways to combat automation, the sharing economy, democratic decline and the erosion of state services. We need an honest report to determine how we can renew our society, neighbourhoods and democracy through investment in all citizens and infrastructures. If politicians don’t initiate a new Beveridge Report, then it is up to the citizenry to compel them through either the ballot box or protest....
More lives have been lost to poverty from 1929 to 1939 and from all the battles our Armed Forces had engaged in on both European and Asian France. My sisters death, our family being forced to abandon my dad, the hunger, the humiliation of debt and homelessness, the howls from cancer patients too poor to afford medicine, the charity Christmas meals for the indigent, the diving through rubbish bins for my tea… All came from a political and economic system that treated Britain’s most vulnerable as chattel as if it had less value than livestock.
When I made my mark for Labour that day, I wasn’t just voting for myself. I was also casting a vote for my dead sister and father who lay nameless in paupers’ pits. I was voting for all those who didn’t survive the great depression or the war we had just fought. I voted for a future that guaranteed a right to housing, education and medical care regardless of your financial situation. I voted for an economy that was protected through the nationalising of key industries so that when industrial strategies were devised they would be for the benefit of the whole country, not just a select group of stockholders.
I felt both pride and gratitude to the Labour Party for creating the NHS in 1948 because, by making healthcare public rather than a commercial concern, it allowed me in millions of others to no longer fear that illness would lead to penuries and homelessness. To this day, my gratitude to the Labour Party remain steadfast because it was they who emancipated our country from the shackles of pay-as-you-go healthcare.
No matter how much I could hear in the distance the sounds of the welfare state being constructed, it was also a time of despondency. Many believed we’d won the war but surrender the peace to put perpetual rationing, belt tightening and postponing personal pleasures for the National good. It was a fearful time to be young, middle-aged or old because none of us knew what tomorrow would bring. The Cold War was becoming more intense and nationalism was again rearing its head in the United States with its growing anti-communism...
In the 1950 general election, Labour polled over 1.5 million more votes than the Conservatives, but was returned to government with only a razor-thin majority of just six seats this compelled Attlee to call another election in October 1951.....There was nowt in the shops, nowt in our larders, nowt in our hearts but unease, resentment and a sense that we’d been betrayed by our so-called betters. Simply going into a shop and seeing empty shelves made me realise that my city, my county, my country were a long way from the land of milk and honey that have been promised to us by Labour after the war. Simply put, the people had grown tired of sacrificing today for a brighter tomorrow.
There, I would put pen to paper and try to understand the injustices my family, my generation and my class endured because Britain was governed by and for elites. I wasn’t radical then and I’m not now but I knew that if you ignore the pleas of ordinary folk for good jobs, decent homes and a decent future, social unrest will soon follow. My long and generally happy and productive life only happened because the welfare state was created by a Labour government when I was 22....
'It is a vital and powerful voice speaking across generations about the struggle for a just society' Jeremy Corbyn
THIS A CALL TO ARMS FOR THE MANY, NOT THE FEW: DON'T LET THE PAST BECOME OUR FUTURE
Harry Leslie Smith was a great British stalwart. A survivor of the Great Depression, a Second World War veteran, a lifelong Labour supporter and a proud Yorkshire man, Harry's life straddled two centuries. As a young man, he witnessed a country in crisis with no healthcare, no relief for the poor, and a huge economic gulf between the North and South.
Britain is at its most dangerous juncture since Harry's youth - the NHS and social housing are in crisis, whilst Brexit and an unpopular government continue to divide the country - but there is hope. Just as Clement Attlee provided hope in 1945, Labour's triumphant comeback of June 2017 was a beacon of light ...Britain has overcome adversity before and will do so again - a new nation will be forged from the ashes of grave injustice.
Moving and passionate, Don't Let My Past be Your Future interweaves memoir and polemic in a call to arms. Above all, this book is a homage to the boundless grace and resilience of the human spirit. (From Amazon)
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