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.'
"Neoliberalism has turned the welfare state into Bolton Abbey. It has become a beautiful pile of rubble. It was exposed to the indifference of successive governments, including Labour, for too long. Moreover, this generation has allowed the 1% to steal its birth right and that can’t continue for much longer without Britain returning to my past. And if we are in the 21st-century are forced to my past because the Tories have successfully murdered the welfare state, it will be more brutal and bloodier for you than it was for me so many years ago. This time there will be no mercy because the state will be able to monitor and control all facets of your life; our entire lives can be traced, from our use of mobiles and emails to comments on Social media to purchases via credit card and the use of loyalty cards. Anonymity has gone, and the state has greater weaponry for social control than ever before. It will be impossible to resist to mobilise like we did in the 1930s and 1940s. You must begin to act now because tomorrow it could be too late.
Everything that we have today in terms of social benefits originates from those six years when Labour was in government after the war. Without the Attlee government, Britain would’ve been a dark and fearful place during the second half of the 20th century. And yet many of our citizens are ignorant of history and made arrogant by the fake news of the right wing, which disparages the great accomplishments we made as a nation, when we cleared the slums, they free healthcare at all, built affordable homes and made higher education access a ball to working-class kids.
We shouldn’t be where we are today as a people and as a society. 1 million people should not need to use food banks to keep their bellies full. Politics is vile to people and now too many are turning to the right wing populists the way the poor once flocked to snake oil salesman to cure their ailments...
UKIP is a fraud. It can no more offer political salvation to the disenfranchised masses than a television evangelist can fast track you to heaven with £100 a nation to his dodgy ministry.
As for the Tories, the concept of aspirational politics is a cruel deceit. Toryism is no more than an elaborate pyramid scheme where they convince everyone to steal from the lowest to keep their place in the hierarchy.
As for Labour, my heart will always be with them...I hope the party will heal its divisions and grow more united because of its recent electoral gains during the snap general election. But more importantly, I hope the party has learned that it can’t help the working classes, the vulnerable or the middle classes if the right wing and left-wing of the party are at each others throats and a blood feud....the success of Labour’s 2017 election manifesto proves that pragmatic socialism is as attractive to this generation as it was to mine in 1945.
We must never forget, nor to hide or diminish, how much good New Labour did when in government. They established the minimum wage, greater environmental protection and greater inclusion, brokered the Good Friday Agreement and allowed for civil partnerships for gays and lesbians. Tony Blair and New Labour also were able to instil an optimism in our nation, which should not be discounted. But the sheer arrogance and folly of Iraq plus the financial obscenity of PFI, the private finance initiative that has indebted generations to come, left a bad taste in the mouths of many who believe in progressive politics. Up until the 2017 general election, many voters felt betrayed by Labour whether in Scotland, the Labour heartlands in England or the metropolitan regions – everyone had an axe to grind with Labour because they promised us the moon in the late 1990s and instead delivered as the shame of the Chilcot enquiry....
My faith in Labour has been tested over the years, but I have never doubted it is the only political movement in Britain that can deliver real change to ordinary people. That’s why, in 2014, after years of being an anonymous citizen who went about his life trying to do the best for his family and community, I felt compelled to speak out about the decline of the welfare state and slow creep towards privatisation of the NHS, when I spoke at the Labour Party conference. My speech was shared almost 3,000,000 times on Facebook because I was able to remind Britain that life before the welfare state and the NHS wasn’t like an episode of Downton Abbey for the majority of citizens. I was able to talk about my sister's unjust death and of those who suffered from cancer but were denied morphine because they couldn’t afford the cost of medicine. I was able to remind our nation of their ancestors struggles. I was able to let people know that a nation can heal its injustices, its wounds and its animosity, if it has the courage to be a country that won’t leave those wounded by austerity on the economic and social battlefields of life. I was honoured to speak for the dead of my generation and gratified that Labour in 2014 felt it was important to remind Britain for inglorious past before the welfare state.
Under Corbyn, Labour has begun to show that it can harness the ideals of Clem Attlee’s government, which won over working-class lads like me to the practical benefits that can be achieved by participating in democracy. But even though Labour has risen from the ashes of low polling through a return to the common sense populism of building of Britain for the many not the few, it must remember that we live in uncertain times...The party must not allow it sudden popularity to blind it; it must be built on more than the temporary whims of the electorate. It’s why Labour politicians and supporters must start to come to terms with their failures like Iraq and perhaps their stance on Brexit. They must start telling the hard and bitter truth about how we can build a new and vibrant social state for everyone.
The world we live in today is rife with corruption, populism and economic sectarianism. This is a harbinger of worse things to come. And if we do not fight against austerity, the gradual privatisation of the NHS or addiction to fake news, we will be frogmarched back to my childhood where no one lived well except the rich."
Final notes on this book to be appear on this blog soon.
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