Harry Leslie Smith & The Corbyn Years

I Stood with Harry

This an excerpt from my book I Stood with Harry that currently sits in the slush piles of a hundred or so publishers in Britain, Canada and the USA.

You were surprised when Corbyn won the leadership. “Crikey, that’s going to piss off, Blair and his bunch."

You wished, and I hoped, as did thousands of others, that Corbyn’s leadership would revolutionise the party and then the country because he had the nation’s youth behind him. Corbyn offered up real hope when it came to Climate Change, economic inequalities, racism, and the rise of fascism. Corbyn offered something radical- real hope. The problem was that he wasn’t ruthless enough to enable it.

To the establishment inside the Labour Party and outside in the media and financial world, Corbyn was their nemesis, and they weren’t going to have any of it. To them, Corbyn’s politics was like a foreign bacillus in the bloodstream that must be destroyed. The moment Corbyn was installed as party leader, the Blairites, the careerists, began to plot their revolt against him with the aid of a compliant media class. It was ruthless, as the machinations fomented by courtiers of a deposed monarch in exile would use to reoccupy a lost throne, and it worked.

In October 2015, we returned to Britain. You had come to help English NHS junior doctors who were on strike for better pay and work conditions. It was the same battle plan used for your book launch or the past election - hit the ground running and travel across England by train to talk to as many people about life before the NHS, and why equitable pay for the institution’s doctors, nurses, and all hospital staff was good sense. In London, you addressed thousands of junior doctors at a rally near Trafalgar Square. Above the demonstration, police helicopters hovered with menace in a sky dark and oppressed by rain. You noted to the crowd that your sister Marion died on a similarly dismal wet day in October 1926 for wanting public healthcare at the age of ten in a poor house infirmary.

When you were done speaking, five thousand junior doctors chanted your name. Afterwards, hundreds of those doctors approached you to thank you for speaking. They promised you that they would do all they could to ensure that healthcare in England remained in public hands. The one person who seemed unimpressed by your speech or presence was Labour MP Sarah Champion, who also spoke at the rally. After her tepid speech, Champion stepped past your wheelchair as if you were a set of television cables to avoid.

In late November, we returned home. You recuperated from the trip by nodding off in your chair on wintry afternoons, while I began working on preliminary notes for your final book, Don’t Let My Past Be your Future.

We didn’t know it, but that year was our last good Christmas together. As was our norm, since Peter died, it was just the two of us on the 25th. But we feasted on turkey, joyful memories, and decent wine. We were relaxed like we hadn’t been in over a decade. We knew that the work done over the last years had borne fruit. We believed we had done well.

Yet by the time we had taken down the Christmas tree, and I put it outside for collection, the ease we had felt over the holidays evaporated. Outside of our apartment, warmed by our friendship and love, the unrelenting refugee crisis caused by the civil war in Syria began to upset both you and me.

You often muttered the phrase to yourself, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

There was something else digging at you, and that was the upcoming EU referendum in June. "It's going to turn over the applecart. Once this starts, it will never end because win, lose or draw, no one will ever be satisfied by the results."

We returned for it in May so that you could campaign for the Remain side in the Eu referendum.

The Remain campaign disappointed you as much as Ed Miliband’s election campaign. The Yes campaign advisors had triangulated its strategy based on their own financially secure lives, which had not been affected by years of neoliberalism and global supply chains. The Remain Campaign would have succeeded if, like the strategist, everyone was well off as themselves. But the average resident in early 21st century Britain didn’t own anything outright, except their prejudices, fears, and consumer debt. Euroscepticism was a factory default setting in too many due to a corrupted news media depicting foreign workers and migrants as a drain on the nation’s resources, much like they painted benefits claimants as scroungers to perpetuate the austerity policy.

It disgusted you that Labour accepted the Remain campaign should be bipartisan. “The Tories have a different concept of what the EU should be for, and it’s not strengthening workers’ rights across the continent, standardising living wages, improving welfare, infrastructure, housing, and being more accommodating to refugees.”

You rightly believed the Tory party created EU scepticism by generating a repulsion for the free movement of nationals within the union. You also believed and consistently said throughout the campaign that the EU was a system that needed massive reform because NEO-liberals hijacked an institution first conceived by social democrats. It now was more about preserving the entitlements of the 1% and ring-fencing the continent from refugees who needed our support. For the EU to have any meaning, it had to be a social movement and economic partnership.

Thank you for reading my substack. Your support and subscriptions help me maintain my dad Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive as well as keep me housed. On February 25, 2023 Harry Leslie Smith would have been a hundred. I think he would have been sickened that his warning to not make his past our future became true. Take care, John