The Brown Envelope Book

"107 poets, writers and activists join forces in opposition to the Government and DWP's hostile environment against the unemployed, sick and disabled in 318pp of poetry, prose and polemic."

Available from: https://www.therecusant.org.uk/the-brown-envelope-book/4595276669

The book is reviewed in The Disability News Service:

"A foreword to the book has been written by its patron, disabled activist John McArdle, co-founder of the grassroots group Black Triangle.

He says in the foreword that the book “illustrates the trials of claimants with stories of individuals who have been subjected to this cold-hearted barbarism in graphic and heart-rending detail” and will “enlighten all who read it as to the ongoing injustices being perpetrated upon ordinary people by other ordinary people working as bureaucrats in our country”.

Morrison has previously published two influential anti-austerity anthologies, Emergency Verse – Poets in Defence of the Welfare State, published in 2010, and The Robin Hood Book – Verse Versus Austerity, the following year."

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/brown-envelope-book-illustrates-cold-hearted-barbarism-of-dwp/

Left Field: a memoir: Privatising my Vote

Left Field: a memoir: Privatising my Vote: The postal vote at the 12 December election was 37% . In previous elections it never got out of the teens.   The postal vote was, ...

GE2019 - Notes From The Late Great Harry Leslie Smith (Part 5)

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.  His words were very prophetic, he mentions the folly of following or believing Johnson.

From his last book 'Don't Let My Past Be Your Future.'

"I know my moment on this earth it’s almost done. I will soon join my mother, my father, sisters, brothers, wife, son and friends who have passed on before me. I have tried to relate to you what I have learned and seen through many years of life because we are in the most dangerous time. It will be up to you to decide whether you fight for sunlight or submit to darkness. I am too old now to do much more but tell the truth about the history of my generation. To survive, live well and enjoy love, you must choose the path of your ancestors. In you the blood of all those who fought for fair wages, housing, healthcare and defended our island against the tyranny of Hitler. ....

I can’t make that decision for you. I have shown you what that world looked like when the 1% enslaved an entire generation to feed their greed. It is now up to you because the sunset has come to my life but you must not let it come to our country. It shouldn’t be this way. It should be better for you. You deserve more...

I was born in the darkest of times and it seems because of Brexit and Donald Trump that I will exit this world in a similar era of uncertainty, inequality and cruelty.

Right now, we are at a juncture in history that is as dangerous to this generation as the 1930s were to mine. There are serious threats of war emerging all across the globe, some calls by the folly of neoliberalism and others just erupting because we forgot that tyranny, if fed, will metastasise in even the healthiest of societies.

It is your choice now to decide whether you let the jungles of greed, neoliberalism and corporations grow over and obscure the welfare state... My past won’t become your future if you hold firm to the belief that all people are born equal and deserve the right to life free of want, ignorance and sickness. Believe in yourself, and social justice, and live by the creed that we are all our brothers keeper.

When I glance at this Tory government front bench I can plainly see that these politicians came off the rack of a party political machine that is good at only one thing: promoting opportunists....

It’s why I felt sick and when Theresa May, after a series of terrorism attacks in London and Manchester in Spring 2017, claimed our security had not been compromised by the fact that 20,000 police personnel have been let go during these long years of austerity.... it doesn’t take a security expert to deduce that after four major terrorist attacks in three months, which have left scores dead in Manchester and London, that the simple tools of security have been compromised by Tory austerity policies that have got it or police services. 

Political talk at the beginning of April 2017 was of how the Tories could govern Britain for a generation and that Labour, unless it became a party that favoured more right-wing economic policies under the guise of middle of the road politics, was doomed to obscurity. However we live in the most unsettled of political times and, because Jeremy Corbyn harnessed the hopes and dreams of the youth vote, Labour was able to get its largest folk share since 2001.

It surprised everyone, including me. Six months ago, when I was first writing the concluding chapters to this book, I was doubtful that Corbyn could survive until autumn 2017. I could not imagine then how are political landscape could change so dramatically. 

Labour on social media changed the Tories narrative that this election was about Brexit, and made it instead about austerity...

In the north, south and all compass points in Britain, Corbyn delivered speeches of passion and popular eloquence because he talked about wanting a government that was for the many not the few. I saw him transformed during this election from a fringe politician into a national leader.

Yet it wasn’t until Labour produced its election manifesto that I felt Jeremy Corbyn had a real chance of breaking Theresa May’s commanding lead in the polls. It was a manifesto that I understood would be a game changer. It was held for 21st century voters the same optimism, the same life changing policies that caused me to vote labour in 1945 at the age of 22.

Corbyn’s manifesto wasn’t revolutionary: it just contained good and practical policies that would benefit most citizens. It called for things this nation needs, such as the renationalisation of the rail services, as well as an NHS for and by the people. It spoke to the young who have borne the heavy price of austerity by offering free university tuition, a proper housing strategy and a child day care strategy. Moreover, all of these initiatives by Labour were properly costed...

But what when Theresa May is replaced by another Tory, whether it is Boris Johnson… Or another that stalks in the shadows, don’t ever believe the Tories if they try to tell you they have changed their stripes. You see, even if the Tories were to end austerity, it can never really be over until they restore all they took away from us in the last seven years and take back all they gave to the wealthy through tax cuts or privatisation of state assets.

So, what remains now in the wake of Theresa May's botched attempt to win glory for herself and greater Parliamentary power for the Tories? Without a doubt, we will see another general election very soon and we should accept, owing to the volatility of politics today, that all bets are off. What is essential between now and the next election, if we wish to end austerity and prevent my past becoming your future, is that Labour increases its outreach to the young, the disaffected and the hard-pressed middle-class. Labour has a real chance of forming the next government and returning economic and social equality back to this country. To do so will not be easy. It took almost 30 years to destroy the welfare state and its rebuilding will be a long and arduous task. But, as I saw the foundations dug for a progressive society in 1945, I know we can do it again..."

The greatest tribute to Harry would be to vote Labour in his memory, for his son and to all of us who want a better world.

GE2019 - Notes From The Late Great Harry Leslie Smith (part 4)

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.

GE 2019 - Notes From the Late Great Harry Leslie Smith (Part 3)

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)

GE 2019 - Notes From the Late Great Harry Leslie Smith (Part 2)

Sadly Harry Leslie Smith died late last year in his mid-90s.

But his wise words live on.

I want to pay tribute to him in these blogs by quoting from his last book 'Don't Let My Past Be Your Future.'

"The political discourse Jeremy Corbyn has started in the Labour Party about the benefits of migration is good for this country. Corbyn believes that the real problem Britain faces isn’t migration because newcomers to our country can add to its wealth through the valuable skills many bring here, through the taxes they pay and through the businesses they build. To Corbyn, the real issues that are destroying the prosperity of workers can be laid squarely at the feet of an establishment that encourages wage suppression, contains the rights of trade unions, adopts the use of zero hour contracts, pays a ‘living wage’ that no one can live on and dismantles many social services that people depend on. Naturally, Corbyn and Labour also understand that migration has affected marginalised communities that were gutted by austerity, which is why they have called for the migrant impact fund suspended by the Tories to be reinstated as it helped vulnerable areas shoulder the burden on services that can arise from an influx of low skill migrants...

I’ve seen the mob call out many times throughout my life that it’s migrants that are ruining Britain. I remember the signs that said ‘No blacks. No Irish. No dogs’ in both good times and bad. But we must remember what my generation learnt in the 1930s: it’s not migration that is eroding the fabric of our civil society but issues like low wages, lack of job protection, insufficient or too expensive housing, lack of opportunity and the state taking too little tax from either the elite or giant corporations.

Xenophobia and bigotry always increase during uncertain economic times because racists and right-wing elements in government and society know they can divide us through spreading hateful falsehoods about minorities. Too many people in this country view the worsening refugee crisis that is overwhelming Europe as something that we should stay well away from, and excuse the callousness by claiming that those who arrive on Europe’s shores are not authentic like those in the 1930s who fled Hitler’s Germany. The sad irony is that the middle-classes in Britain in the 1930s, abetted by tabloids like the Daily Mail portraying Jews as vermin or Communists intent on destabling our way of life, used that same excuse to turn their back on refugees who were subsequently gassed In the Holocaust. The tactics used by UKIP, and unfortunately now large swathes of the Conservative party, to portray Muslim refugees as either terrorists or welfare scroungers are little different from what was employed in the 1930s against Jewish refugees....

At every turn, good people in Britain are given an opportunity to excuse or reinforce their prejudices against the marginalised because most of the media is feeding into a narrative that says that poverty is a character defect rather than a failure of society to adequately protect its less fortunate. The Conservatives and UKIPs entire ideology is based upon wedge politics. The migration of war weary individuals from Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan or a dozen other countries that are plagued by war or civil unrest fails to elicit sympathy In us because our politicians would prefer to deflect the blame onto the victims rather than our arms industry or our foreign policy. Both now and in the 1930s, refugees are dehumanised by language. It’s cheaper in the short term to paint victims of war as criminals, rapists and fifth columnist Islamic fundamentalists rather than seek a solution to the conflicts from which these refugees have fled or to help them resettle. 

Those on the left must counter the propaganda being churned out by the right-wing that benefits recipients are cheats and that the working-class has been betrayed by a membership of the EU or by the free movement of labour. The enemies of wage earners and immigrants or those in receipt of benefits; the mortal foes are the corporations that suppress wages and hide profits offshore by legal means. People have to use their time in shop queues, church meeting halls, mosques, synagogues, temples, lunchrooms and on the train ride home to talk about the real abuses working people face each day because of Tory induced austerities, not to chat about the match of the day

At home the Daily Mail complained about the scourge of Jewish refugees from Germany, and politicians wanted Britain to believe that they were desperate to get to Britain not from fear of Hitler but out of desire to subvert a way of life through the foreign ways and Bolshevik tendencies. If that doesn’t remind you of Donald Trump, then you have not been paying attention to his speeches for the last two years..."

'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)

GE 2019 - Notes From the Late Great Harry Leslie Smith

Sadly Harry Leslie Smith died late last year in his mid-90s.

But his wise words live on.

I want to pay tribute to him in these blogs by quoting from his last book 'Don't Let My Past Be Your Future.'

"The more Britain slips down the rabbit hole of Brexit, the harder it is to imagine that we will ever be able to preserve our NHS or maintain and improve our welfare state. It will take us years to try and establish trade deals that will keep our standard of living even at the current, equal level."

"Britain has the highest level of income inequality for all G20 countries, according to studies conducted by Equality Trust UK. The divide between the haves and have nots in Britain hasn’t been this great since the 1930s."

"The years 2016–17 across much of Europe felt more like 1938 before the storms of war swept across the globe. I was made acutely aware of this when I visited the infamous and now disbanded Calais Jungle where thousands of refugees from wars in the Middle East and Africa congregated, in conditions I have not seen since the Second World War, in an effort to find a safe haven in Britain across the channel. It confirmed to me that our western world is sitting atop a funeral pyre built from the injustices of corporatism and arrogant greed. The match has been lit and a fire smoulders just below our democracies..."

Harry Leslie Smith

'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)