“It is still bleak and stinks of human suffering.” Harry Leslie Smith on neoliberalism

A tenth anniversary is a lot of water under the bridge. The decade between 2014 and 2024 was- in the most destructive manner- transformative for our society. Next week, ten years ago- on the fifth- Harry's Last Stand was published. The publisher should have republished the book for the anniversary. But their business model has changed since my dad signed with them and “the world has moved on from Harry,” in their words.

The Labour Party moved on from dad’s message and his legacy once Keir Starmer became leader. So, they aren’t going to remember the publication of this book.

I am glad they won’t because my Dad would have detested Starmer and the careerists who cling to neoliberalism- the politics of technocracy and fascism- the way barnacles attach themselves to ships for a free ride. To them, its all about having a good life and everyone else can get stuffed.

Today would have been the day in 2014, I travelled with my father to visit the doss he lived in for two years during the worst parts of the Great Depression. My dad was a good and kind man, but poverty fucked him up. Had it not been for marrying my mum, he would have died young- broken by the humiliation of what he endured as a boy.

Below are my notes about the publishing of Harry's Last Stand. It's really a letter to my dad. But it is a true portrait of those times and how much we need a revolution for these times.

That year, at the end of May, we flew into Manchester. For you, the city’s airport didn’t have pleasant memories because it was where you spent your last RAF posting before demob, in 1948.

The RAF sent you there as punishment for marrying Mum because marriage to foreign nationals from former belligerent powers in World War Two, although not illegal, wasn’t encouraged.

It was an attempt to demoralise you and let you know that a Labour government might be in London. But the military was controlled by officers, not from the working class. Your superiors gave you one task until your discharge papers came through- smash with a sledgehammer- thousands of surplus RAF radio receivers. So as each hammer blow destroyed hundreds of pounds of salvageable equipment, you tried to plot how you would provide a good life for your new wife on civvy street.

We didn't stay long in Manchester, only one night at an airport hotel where the wait staff believed we were on holiday.

"It's nice that you are taking your old man on a vacation," I explained that you had authored a book about your life in the North during the Great Depression. "Bless, but I don't read books."

We left the following morning and took a bus to Bradford, where your publisher had arranged a few interviews with northern newspapers so that you could ease yourself slowly into the burden of the tour.

On the coach to Bradford, you grew pensive. While gazing out at the rain-soaked moors as we drove down the M1, you said. “My whole life, I’ve hated buses, because they all bring back memories of when my family went to Bradford after we fled Barnsley ahead of the bailiffs in 1928.”

The few days we spent in Bradford were emotionally uncomfortable for you. You hadn’t been back to the city since you emigrated to Canada sixty-one years earlier. “Unlike Lot’s wife, I never looked back.” Yet you insisted on revisiting the doss you had lived in as a boy in St Andrew’s Villas. It was a place where all hope was abandoned, for your family and any others that found accommodation under its merciless roof.

In the cab over the noise of the windshield wipers, you said, “It hasn’t stopped raining over Bradford since my family came to this town in 1928.”

Standing in front of the doss where so much hurt had occurred to your family was too much for you to take in all at once and you wept. After you wiped some tears away with a handkerchief, you reflected the neighbourhood hadn’t changed much.

“It is still bleak and stinks of human suffering.”

We walked down the steep road and off in the distance. You pointed to an off-licence and said, “At seven years old, I pushed a beer barrow up this bloody hill to earn my scratch. I did that work without a proper meal in my stomach. Imagine because you have no other option to survive having to make your child work so hard that he can’t study for school because he’s exhausted."

Afterwards, we took another cab to Scholemoor cemetery where dark clouds hung heavy over a damp spring afternoon. There you visited a field where in times past pits were dug and thousands of indigent corpses were placed including your dad, in October 1943.

You whispered.

“I got out Dad.”

After that, you said no more. We stood silent separated by memories that you alone experienced and I tried to interpret through the lens of a well-fed childhood.

It began to spit rain that fell as hard as pellets. “Let’s go and get a beer, I am tired of remembering,” you said, deflated by your personal history.

A few days later, we were in London for the official promotion of your book. We took a cab from King's Cross to Bloomsbury and checked into a posh hotel your publisher generously booked for us. Later, the publisher’s managing director explained that he wanted you to experience how authors were treated before corporate penny-pinching did away with book launches replete with luxuries for the talent.

“Enjoy, because it will never happen again for him in this business.”

He was right.

A dinner was held in your honour at the Garrick Club the night before the publication of Harry’s Last Stand. The guests were employees from your publishing company, your agent, the chief book buyer from Waterstones, and Bella Mackie from the Guardian, who fawned over you like an adoring grandchild. But then again, she felt she had discovered you as she promoted your essays to the editors of the Guardian where she then worked. Your support for Corbyn eventually cooled her support for you and contact during your last years trailed off. You were politely ignored in hopes that you either would change your views on Corbyn or get the message, your writing was not appropriate for a newspaper that was most comfortable in the centre of politics.

Throughout the dinner, I sat beside you, but it was your night, so I kept my personality in a supportive role to your book. No matter how integral I was to the Harry’s Last Stand project, I realised that for it to be successful, I should only appear as an inferior cast member, while you assumed the role of a democratic Cincinnatus, come back to Britain to remind your country that compassion was pragmaticism. That night, the Guardian published an excerpt from the book. In real-time, I watched your fame on social media grow, while Amazon books sales soared to number 32 in the nonfiction section. No other book of yours would ever go that high again in online sales. When the dinner was over, we returned to our hotel room. Elated, we had a nightcap and danced together. We believed we had established a strong beachhead, or, at least, a compelling argument for society to revisit Labour’s policies of socialism from 1945. Dancing with you that night reminded me of one Christmas Eve when you, Peter, and I- drunk on Port wine, danced to 1940s jazz tunes until 4 in the morning.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent because all I need is 8 to make June’s payment. But with four days to go, it is getting tight.
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