From Attlee to Corbyn: Why Britain’s Last Stand Begins with a New Socialist Party

These are not the best of times, but they certainly are the worst of times. We live in an age of revolution — except the revolutions happening are the wrong ones, led by and for billionaires who’ve hedged their bets that fascism is safer than houses when it comes to preserving their wealth and absolute power over the teeming masses who slave to make them profits, just as slaves once built pyramids for Egyptian pharaohs.

I honestly don’t know if anything good, progressive, or truly new can emerge in a society where neoliberalism controls every lever of power, influence, and information. Maybe in 2019 — before COVID, before the war in Ukraine, before the genocide in Gaza — social democracy, with a light touch on the economy to make it more equitable, might have altered Britain’s trajectory into fascism. But Britain, the USA, Canada, and the EU are now stuck fast in a state of fascism for the digital age.

Post–World War II Western society — with its rule of law, rules-based international order, social safety nets, free press, competitive politics, and open debate — is a rotting corpse. From its dead body, intolerance, a return to 1930s living standards, and militant xenophobia slither out, infecting every citizen and every institution that underpins a nation’s democratic sovereignty.

My dad has been dead for almost seven years now, and were he to come back to life, I know he’d be both disgusted and outraged by how we bottled it, and let the fascists win.

Speaking truth to power isn’t easy, and it rarely offers any rewards. But my father believed it was necessary to make a last stand for a society where everyone mattered — not just the well-paid. That’s why he spent his final years warning people not to let his generation’s hard-scrabble past become their future.

When Jeremy Corbyn rose, in 2015 to lead the Labour Party, Harry Leslie Smith saw in him not a perfect leader, but a rare chance to steer Britain away from austerity and back toward the pragmatic socialist idealism of the post-war Attlee government.

My father saw in Corbyn a decent man with practical solutions to end the stranglehold neoliberalism had on the economy.

“Corbyn is not a saviour. He is a man like many others who has been gifted a moment in time when he can affect the political future of a nation.”

But he also recognised how the established order in Britain saw Corbyn as a threat to their power.

“Corbyn scares the media and the establishment. He represents a rebuke to decades of greed, callousness, and inequality.”

When Jeremy Corbyn rose to prominence, my father recognised in Labour’s platform echoes of the pragmatic socialism he had voted for after World War II — a world that was supposed to be fair, equal, and free from want.

But my dad, Harry Leslie Smith, was no naïve idealist. He carried hard-won wisdom and wrote near the end of his life:

“If Corbyn falters, it will not be because his policies failed, but because the establishment, the media, and even his own party spent all their efforts trying to destroy him.”

In November 2018, as Labour under Corbyn came within a hair’s breadth of collapsing Theresa May’s minority government, my dad lay dying. From his deathbed, he mumbled:

“The system won’t allow it.”

He understood that socialism wasn’t coming back to Britain without a revolution — without the trade unions renouncing neoliberalism, and without the people breaking free from the grip of press barons and tech companies who had poisoned their belief systems. Without that, it was just “pissing in the wind.”

Were he alive today, Harry Leslie Smith would back — 100% — the new political party led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. But he would also be sceptical of its efficacy unless it was truly radical and able to proselytise that radicalism to the electorate.

Selling hope to the electorate for a distant future will be a hard and fickle wind for Britain’s new socialist political party to sail on because the next General Election is in 2029. Hate however keeps fresh for longer periods as the right has taught us.

Anger, and revenge — against the 1%, the genociders, and a corrupt corporate news media — must be part of this new socialist’s party’s platform. A New Deal must be hammered out as a manifesto for and by the people.

Because if this new socialist party wastes its opportunity by believing it can negotiate with neoliberalism, with the corporate press, or with a two-party parliamentary democracy that only serves Britain’s wealthiest, then they, not the 1%, will have delivered Britain’s ordinary people to the guillotine.

Your support keeps me housed and helps keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive.

As we near the end of the month, new paid subscribers or one-time tips make all the difference in keeping the lights on. It often comes down to just a few hundred dollars. I hate making these kinds of pleas — but like so many others, I live on the edge of a cost-of-living crisis that can drown any of us at a moment’s notice.

That fight to stay afloat has been made harder by my own health — cancer, lung disease, and other comorbidities that make surviving in these times of global economic collapse even more daunting.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve worked to complete The Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished memoir of my father’s generation that Harry began before his death. It’s now finished, except for a few final adjustments. The book traces his life from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s historic election victory.

For those who requested a copy, you’ll be receiving one in the coming weeks. Once the final tweaks are made, I’ll begin submitting it to publishers.

I hope publishers see the value in this story — but even if they don’t, I’ll bring it into the world.
It deserves to be read.

In solidarity,
John