Harry Leslie Smith-"The Toffs Can Piss Off." A Rebel's 102nd Birthday.

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It’s my dad’s birthday today, and 102 years have passed since his birth in a Barnsley slum to working-class parents. Six years ago last November, at the age of 95, he died raging against the dying of the light. The end of his life was ministered by the loving hands of public healthcare which didn't exist at the beginning of his life in 1923. Then people in Britain and everywhere else lived or died based upon a criteria of wealth rather than medical need.

In 2025, the hope that public healthcare can continue to function for ordinary citizens has diminished because neoliberalism is selling it off to the private sector. This process began when my Dad was still alive, but its sell-off has accelerated. Now, I am thankful my father didn't live to a hundred because the world after 2018 was his past risen from the dead by neoliberalism.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed our world in 2020 as much as the Spanish Flu did to the people who survived the First World War. But the rich learnt from past mistakes. Instead of allowing a plague to foment revolution in the people. They used it as their moment to make things more authoritarian and economically harsh. The entitled monetised humanity and we became merely the sum of their algorithms. We are data and labour for them.

Between the millstones of capitalism & neoliberalism humanity is being pulverised or juiced to the last drop of labour, for the benefit of the 1%. They don’t even say a blessing over the meal they made from our sweat & toil that made them rich & us at the bone yard's front door.

There is a housing crisis, cost of living crisis and climate emergency crisis, which has unleashed misery on anyone not part of the top income earning class. Government and the corporate news media’s solution for those existential problems is to increase military spending and cut social program budgets. We have walked into the long darkness of authoritarianism and left-wing opposition doesn't have the stomach to put up a 1930s resistance to fascism.

The war in Ukraine is now three years old and it has cut down a generation of Ukrainians in their bloom. It shouldn't have happened and it was cruel of the West to pretend to Ukraine before the war started that they had a chance to become a NATO member. Russia would no more allow that to happen than the USA would allow Canada to become a Bric Member nation. Western Governments wanted to bleed Russia dry with Ukrainian blood. Instead, the geopolitical machinations in Washington, London, Paris and Ottawa ensure any armistice for Ukraine shall be as brutal as the conflict being waged. They killed a nation more than Putin.

But the West is doing that everywhere- killing nations. Gaza is a genocide by Israel which we enabled making us the co-conspirators in the greatest crime against humanity this century. The medieval barbarity perpetrated by Israel and us still has not reached satiety. It will probably lead to the complete breakdown of Western society.

The refugee crisis is worse now than it has ever been in modern history. Our method to deal with the refugee crisis isn’t a remedy but another recipe for genocide.

Unlike the 1940s, these are the end days. Perhaps it’s not like Rome’s fall in the 400s. But it is something like the final moments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. Something beautiful may be born from our demise. However, more than likely because we have nuclear weapons and sociopaths in charge, it will be the end of things.

Even in 2019, I still had hope that the left might be able to change the course of our downfall. But there were signs everywhere that much of the left if they were in positions of influence, weren't socialists but careerists who didn’t want change as much as they coveted a comfortable income and enviable lifestyle.

I remember being in London, the day before or the day after my Dad’s memorial in February 2019. I met with some of those in the publishing world who were associated with Harry’s Last Stand. A few in the group went out of their way to repeat over and over how they despised Jeremy Corbyn and thought him a deplorable anti-Semite. Another said a VIP in attendance at the memorial only came because their love for my father was stronger than their hate for Corbyn.

I don’t wonder why today among the powerful, my dad is forgotten by publishers, agents, journalists, trade unions and politicians.

He is still remembered by ordinary people and that is what he would have wanted. Or as he would have said "The toffs can piss off."

In his brilliant blaze across British political society between 2014-2018. It frustrated many influential people that my father wouldn't be marketed as a sentimental treacle for a bygone age, where people still had patriotism for their country.

There is only a whispered breath between life and death. I know this because cancer and the disease growing in my lungs stole from me the certainty of a long and healthy life. We are brief residents and then gone, from existence.

There are far greater things to mourn than my diminished life expectancy. Society, at this moment, is a busted flush. We are walking through fires similar to what your generation experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. But this time ordinary people won't be triumphant; against the greed of the few. There will be no Welfare State, no public healthcare and no democracy. Those aspirations have faded to black.

When I raise my glass of beer to my Dad's memory tonight, I will place him where he was happiest-Hamburg 1947. Then, he was 24, the world was at peace, and it was summer. He is in a canoe with his lover, who will become his wife and, much later on- my mother.

His lover's hand trails in the water of the Alster, and while shirtless, he ploughs an oar gently into the cool water, quoting from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

The future awaits, and my father is not afraid. He will plunge into it and swim through its beautiful, rough currents until the tide drags him under in 2018 to join the dead from his life on the shores of history. As my brother Peter said at the end of his short life, "It was a fucking blast."

We all must love until the darkness comes for us.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. It’s a bit of an SOS with 4 days left in the month before rent day. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John.