Integrity on Neoliberalism's Hot Tin Roof

At around four in the morning, the heatwave arrived like a much-delayed flight. Last year and in the years before, heat domes sat over my city by early June. Although tardy in 2026, it hadn’t forgotten how to sit on top of the air in my bedroom like a weighted blanket.

My lungs are no longer content in extreme cold or heat and tighten, making my breathing feel laboured. Whether this comes from my disease or from anxiety, I am not sure. Regardless, the result is the same: sleeplessness. Yet I am not alone. It may not be lung disease keeping people from sleeping during extreme weather conditions, but millions are tossing and turning. They are fretting and sweating because of the cost of living crisis, climate breakdown, and the surge in xenophobia. Intolerance, like the humidex, is rising to unhealthy levels.

Before even the birds woke, I got stuck in an anxious interior monologue. Intrusive thoughts always come when there is no one around to refute them. So they fill the spaces in your mind like concert-goers with general admission tickets. Mine are pretty much the same: bills needing to be paid, rent needing to be cleared, work needing to be attended to.

During these bouts, when I remember the past, it’s like acid reflux when there are no antacids handy.

Ever since Harry’s Last Stand began, the question has been stuck in my throat whether it was the right thing to do, putting my dad at the end of his life on that path to recognition but also compromise. I feel responsible for the wear and tear it took on him physically and emotionally, as well as our limited financial resources. The only clear idea I had at the beginning was to preserve my father’s recollections of life before the Welfare State. Connecting it politically to today was something that evolved between 2010 and 2013.

In 2013, I remarked tongue-in-cheek:

“Dad, if you could find Jesus or become a Tory and put it in a book, you would become a wealthy man.”

I have no doubt it would have made him very rich. Captain Tom’s rise to fame is a case in point.

Book writing and marketing the finished product require unhealthy collaborations with people of questionable ethics and dubious motivations in journalism, politics, and publishing.

However, generally, the people society hears from daily in politics, punditry, journalism, and writing are more concerned with making better-than-average salaries for themselves than truth-telling, creating art, or making dramatic changes to politics. You can see it now with all the sycophants praising Genocide Starmer for being a man of integrity or positioning themselves for some plum position, title, or access from Burnham, Labour’s Dauphin, until he becomes PM on July 20th.

There is much arse-kissing, groupthink, and knowing who to applaud and who to hiss at to build one’s public persona.

Any book my father was commissioned to write for a publisher required concessions to avoid making it too radical. One even suggested, though it was never done, “Write like Polly Toynbee.” Another wanted Harry to pen a Guardian piece where he resumed wearing the poppy for Remembrance Sunday.

At the end of the Labour Party Conference in 2014, The Guardian suggested Harry write a piece on how Ed Miliband was the prime minister to save the NHS. The paper does this for every Prime Ministerial prospect they believe best meet the needs of neoliberalism.

After meeting Ed, my dad thought him weak, aloof and disconnected. He wanted Cameron gone as prime minister but concluded that, without a strong left wing in the party, Miliband would drift and appease neoliberal centrism.

My dad really didn’t want to do it, but I convinced him. I told him that not openly endorsing Miliband would assure him no role in the upcoming election and probably a quick ride back into obscurity. So he obliged, more to please me because he loved his family more than politics, accolades or wealth.

I don’t think his original assessment was wrong on Miliband because, to maintain his Cabinet position, Ed has never denounced the Labour Government’s enablement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Politics, journalism and popular culture have an insidious undercurrent that promotes conformity over truth.

Everyone within that ecosystem is a courtier in the court of Louis XIV.

Books, ideas, podcasts, pundits and politicians groom and court each other in that fishbowl with arse-kissing, shit-talking and mutually beneficial cross-promotion. Often, society’s collective good is ignored for the ambition and personal gain of those in that fishbowl.

Self-preservation, ego and increasing personal income streams take the front seat, whilst preserving democracy is an afterthought.

My dad wasn’t corrupted when he was admitted to that fishbowl because he was in his nineties. He had no future in politics, only in history.

In his second year as a political personality, he stopped heeding marketing advice to appear on influencer television programmes if he thought they were bad for society or simply dickheads.

He refused to do a GMB interview with Piers Morgan despite his publisher being pissed about it.

“It will be bad for book sales.”

“Fuck him and fuck them if they think I will be doing that.”

Many wanted him to screw over Jeremy Corbyn, including MPs who wanted my dad to be part of their dagger thrust. All were told, “Piss off.”

Book writing, politics and journalism must be about more than the here and now.

Unfortunately, invoking “should be” is all we have left under neoliberalism, and it’s not working. Neoliberalism has done to democracy what these heatwaves are doing to society. It has left us sleepless, stressed, our health weakened, and our infrastructure nearly unliveable. It’s no coincidence that neoliberalism is also one of the main authors of climate change and environmental collapse.

For me, rent day approaches like the headlights of a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way. It’s two days away and I doing this temporary gig assignment for 6 weeks that in the long term will be better for me. But in the short term makes it hard to get new subscribers. My time is being stretched in all directions.

The last few months have been difficult. New subscriptions have slowed, and some long-time readers have had to step away because of the cost-of-living crisis. This month alone, I lost two annual subscribers for that reason. But we plod on.

The Green and Pleasant Land is ready to be sent to my father’s old publisher for consideration. But I am stuck on the pitch, proposal and hook needed to get it from the slush pile to an editor’s eye. So, I hesitate. Moreover, I still go through and edit the book because it is so important to get this right for my Dad and his legacy.

A small independent publisher has already expressed interest in bringing it into print, which is heartening. But for my father’s legacy, and for the book itself, it makes sense to try first for the widest possible readership.

Annual subscriptions are 40% off. Nine new subscribers should put me over the top for July. My subscription rates haven’t changed since 2021: $3.50 a month or $30 a year.

Thank you, as always, for reading, sharing and supporting Harry’s Last Stand.