Today, the heat dome currently hanging over my city like a child's magnifying glass above blades of grass got the better of me. It changed my plans, and the essay I have written but am not satisfied with will wait until tomorrow. So instead, I want to share this important conclusion from my dad’s book Don't Let My Past Be Your Future (2017).
This piece holds deep significance today because it reminds us that the struggles and victories of the past are not distant history—they are the foundation of what we still fight for. The welfare state, social justice, and fair opportunity were hard-won by generations before us, and now face unprecedented threats. His words call us to remember, to resist, and to act, lest we slide backward into harsher times.
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Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future-Conclusion.
I began writing this book when I was 93. But the seeds of it were planted in my teens, when I rode my bike out to the moors near Halifax to be alone with my thoughts. There, I would put pen to paper to 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 am not now. But I knew that if you ignore the pleas of ordinary folk for good jobs, decent homes, and a fair future, social unrest will soon follow. My long, generally happy, and productive life only happened because the welfare state was created by a Labour government when I was twenty-two. It's why what I endured through my childhood is now a malevolent ghost that haunts my mind and will do so until I breathe no more.
I am an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. I am one of the last remaining voices from an era when Britain was savage and brutal to all those who did not have wealth.
Now, when I shave in the morning and look at the skin on my face—broken and cracked with age—or my hands—thin and frail—I wonder what became of the young man who survived the Great Depression, or the Britain that was born from the ashes of war but delivered peace and economic security to all of its citizens. Both I, as a young man, and Britain as a compassionate nation are no more. Neoliberalism has turned the Welfare State into something like Bolton Abbey: a beautiful ruin, proceeding slowly into decay, exposed to the elements and to the indifference of successive governments—including Labour, who should have known better.
Moreover, this generation has allowed the 1% to steal its birthright, and that cannot continue much longer without Britain sliding back into the poverty and inequality of my past. However, if we in the 21st century are forced to return to that past because the Tories have successfully murdered the welfare state, it will be more brutal and bloodier than it was in my day. This time, there will be no mercy, because the state will be able to control all facets of your life, and therefore, the ability to resist and mobilise like we did in the 1930s and 1940s will be impossible. You must begin to act now, because tomorrow could be too late.
Everything we have today in terms of social benefits originated from those six years when Labour held government after the war. Without the 1945–1951 Labour government, Britain would have been a dark and fearful place at the end of the twentieth century. And yet many of our citizens, ignorant of history but made arrogant by the fake news of the right wing, disparage the great accomplishments we made as a nation: clearing the slums, giving free healthcare to all, building affordable homes, and making higher education accessible to working-class kids.
We shouldn't be where we are today as a people and society. We shouldn’t have over a million people needing food banks to keep their bellies full. And it is only because politics has failed the people, and now too many are turning to right-wing populists—the way the poor once flocked to snake oil salesmen to cure their ailments. All our political parties are at fault and should be shamed, but some more than others.
Farage is a fraud. He can no more offer political salvation to the disenfranchised masses than a television evangelist can fast-track you to heaven with a hundred-pound donation to a dodgy ministry. It is time the media and other political parties stopped paying lip service to their busman’s holiday version of fascism.
As for the Tories, their concept of aspirational politics is a cruel deceit. Toryism is little more than an elaborate pyramid scheme, where they convince everyone to steal from those beneath them to hold their place in the queue.
Even though my heart is with Labour, my head knows it is in chaos—where factions from both the right and the left are at each other’s throats in a blood feud that may leave both mortally wounded. They have become again like the Party my mother despised in the 1930s: full of high-mindedness, but unable to help the working classes because they are in perpetual civil war. It’s time the party understood the nation is in crisis and needs leadership—a vision with direction, a compass point, and sails to take us all there.
Sadly, few today believe Labour when it speaks about protecting ordinary citizens, because too much bad blood was spilt during the eras of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Make no mistake: New Labour did much good when in government. They established the minimum wage, pushed for environmental protections, greater inclusion, brokered the Good Friday Agreement, and allowed for civil partnerships. But the sheer arrogance and folly of Iraq, plus the financial obscenity of PFI—which has indebted generations—left a bad taste in voters' mouths. Scotland feels betrayed. The heartlands and metropolitan regions—everyone has an axe to grind against Labour because they promised us the moon in the late 1990s and delivered the shame of Chilcot.
It has damaged faith in Labour’s ability to be a party for workers, the middle class, and the vulnerable. In many ways, Jeremy Corbyn was unable to rebuild trust with the electorate. Yet even with all its faults, I still detect in Labour—especially now with a change in leadership—the essence of Clem Attlee’s government in many of its 21st-century goals. But Labour cannot harness populist energy until it becomes popular again. It must start by confronting its failures—like Iraq, and perhaps its stance on Brexit. It must begin telling the hard, bitter truth about what it will take to build a new and vibrant social democratic state for everyone. It must not shape its policies through polling and triangulation, as if human life were an algorithm.
Still, I have faith in Labour. That’s why, after years of being an anonymous citizen who tried to do his best for family and community, I felt compelled to speak out in 2014 about the decline of the Welfare State and the slow creep toward privatisation of the NHS. My speech at the Labour Party Conference was shared almost 3 million times on Facebook. In that speech, I reminded Britain that life before the Welfare State wasn’t like an episode of Downton Abbey for most. I bore witness to my sister’s unjust death, and to cancer patients denied morphine because they couldn’t afford it. I reminded the nation of its ancestors’ struggles. I reminded them that a country can heal its wounds and injustices if it has the courage not to leave those harmed 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 recognised the importance of that memory. But after Labour’s defeat in 2015 and the necessary rise of a leader like Jeremy Corbyn, the party entered turmoil that many in the real world see as self-indulgent. It’s hard to say what will become of Labour under its current leadership—both unfairly attacked by the old order, yet often undermined by poor public relations and a bunker-like mentality.
My life has straddled two centuries, and I’ve witnessed both great and infamous events. But what defines me—how I view Britain and the world—stems from my childhood of extreme poverty and those six turbulent years when Labour sought to remake Britain in the likeness of ordinary people. It’s why I haven’t lost faith in left-wing politics, despite my disappointment with some of its champions, brought low by narcissism or weakness.
The world today is rife with corruption, populism, and economic sectarianism. It signals the worst may yet come. And if we don’t fight austerity, creeping NHS privatisation, or our addiction to fake news, we will be marched back to my childhood—where no one lived well except the rich. I know my time is almost up. I will soon join my mother, father, sisters, brothers, wife, son, and friends who’ve passed. I’ve tried to share what I’ve learned, because we are in the most dangerous time.
It will be your choice—whether to fight for sunlight or submit to darkness. I am too old now to do much more than tell the truth of my generation’s history. To survive, live well, and love—you must follow the path of your ancestors. In you is the blood of those who fought for fair wages, housing, healthcare, and defended Britain from tyranny. In you is the light your grandparents carried when they built the Welfare State.
If you do not call upon the wisdom and spirit of my generation, you will regress to a time when want and ignorance were as deadly as pestilence. I can’t make that choice for you. I have shown you what a world looks like when the 1% enslaves a generation to feed their greed. The sun is setting on my life. You must not let it set on our country too.
It shouldn’t be this way. It should be better. You deserve more than second-rate politics from Theresa May and third-rate lives shaped by austerity.
I was born in darkness, and it seems that—because of Brexit and Donald Trump—I may leave in darkness too.
We stand today at a crossroads as dangerous as the 1930s were to my generation. Serious threats of war rise—some born of neoliberal failures, others because we forgot that tyranny, if fed, metastasizes even in healthy societies.
The choice is yours: either let the jungles of greed, neoliberalism, and corporate power overgrow and obscure the Welfare State, as vines did the great Mayan cities—or reclaim your birthright.
My past won’t become your future if you hold firm to the belief that all people are born equal and deserve a life free of want, ignorance, and sickness. Believe in social justice. Live by the creed: we are all our brother’s keeper.
Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Just a heads up Chat GPT was used to break the conclusion into headline sections. All my writing like Harry’s was ours. But I do use online grammar check to ensure there are no spelling mistakes.
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Over the last 18 months, I've worked to complete my Dad's Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.
The manuscript is now done, apart from some minor edits. It traces his life from 1923 to July 1945, concluding with Labour's landslide in the General election. We can only hope for the same good fortune in 2029, except the victor being a new socialist party in coalition with the Greens rather than a corrupt and moribund Labour Party under Keir Starmer.
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Harry analyzed our current world order down to a T. What a wise soul. Thank you for making his writings available to us.
A fan in Canada.