Keir Starmer has done more to destroy the State than Margaret Thatcher.

2025 is stuck fast in fascism. We won’t shift it without sacrifice and sadly many lives will be lost because fascists don’t go peacefully. I am at the end of my project to put together my Dad’s last work into book form. A few more weeks and it will be ready for a publisher. I am posting this chapter tonight because it is a reminder of how dangerous Keir Starmer is to the ordinary people of Britain. He will make Britain like 1930 for everyone but the nation’s top income earners.

Beta copies of the Green & Pleasant Land will be available in 2-3 weeks. If you want one, direct message me, and I will make sure you get it.

It's coming to the end of a short month and I will be short on my rent. So, if you are able please tip or become a paid subscriber.

Cheers,

John

Chapter Four:

We came to Bradford hoping Dad would find work. But in the city, there was none to be had for even able-bodied men, let alone someone like dad injured with a hernia from his work in the coal pits of Barnsley.

Mum signed our family up with for poor relief. With the little money it provided, we didn’t starve. Instead we wasted away from malnutrition.

Being underfed created a host of physical symptoms for me and my sister, which included leg ulcers and boils that erupted on my body.

These afflictions were commonplace in our neighbourhood- along with lice, rickets and TB.

When the stock markets crashed around the world in October 1929, neither my family nor the rest of Britain’s workers economically displaced by the greed of the middle and upper classes knew that our nightmare was only beginning. The long darkness of economic misery for the working class was to last July 1945 when a Labour Government was elected on a pledge to build a modern Welfare State..

In 1929, the greed of middle-class speculators combined with an unregulated- corrupt banking industry wreaked more havoc on our lives and society than the First World War or the Spanish Flu.

In the last year of the 1920s, we didn't know what hit us. Britain's working class thought they had prepared for any economic storm ahead when they elected a Labour government in May of 1929.

My parent's generation was foolish to believe Ramsey Macdonald as PM was an insurance against the avariciousness of the entitled and their indifference to the living conditions of ordinary citizens.

Ramsey Macdonald sacrificed the well-being of millions of workers to the harshness of the Great Depression by implementing austerity measures that were as cruel as any Tory government before them.

The government abandoned the working class to a dole that paid an amount which guaranteed famine for the recipient. Millions were without income when the mines closed, along with, the textile factories and the factories shuttered.

Like us, they lived off of paltry government benefits that ensured a belly of hunger. Poverty was everywhere, and it created despair that suffocated hope for a future better than the present.

We were abandoned by Ramsey Macdonald's government and left to wither and rot like fruit that had fallen to the ground in autumn.

At the start of 1930, fuel and food were scarce for us and everyone else without work. I still remember my mother on bleak winter mornings reheating for breakfast the porridge we consumed for supper the night before. While she dolloped it out into our bowls, I'd sing.

“Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to give the poor dog a bone. But when she got there, the cupboard was bare. So the poor doggie had none.”

Despite my mother securing a reduced rent in the doss we lived in, through being a harsh rent collector for its absentee landlord, we still were in arrears. Mum charmed the landlord into patience for his money, but not for long.

So, one night before a bailiff came- we slipped from our doss house lodgings and onto unfriendly streets under cold Yorkshire skies.

This new residence was in a wretched slum that possessed furtive characters who seemed to have lived their entire existence at the edge of the gutter as if they were like water rats that feared the light.

There was an overpowering stench to the room we had moved into of the former tenants' sweat and misery.

During those days in that brutal neighbourhood, we lived famished from sunup to sundown. Until one day good fortune seemed to shine down upon my family.

Mum had gone out to pawn her wedding ring,- and as she walked along Manningham Lane; she spied a leather bag with a chain clasp around it. She picked it up and noticed that it had the name of a department store stencilled across it.

Curious and hungry, she proceeded to open it and discovered fifty pounds in notes and silver in the purse. It was a store’s bank purse, and an accounting clerk must have dropped it in the street- while on his way to make their daily deposit. It crossed Mum's mind to pocket the money and not say a word to anyone because fifty pounds was a King’s ransom to a family living on less than a pound a week. However, my mother’s conscience and the knowledge that she was many things but not a thief wore her down.

My mother walked over to the store, whose clientele were the well-heeled residents of Bradford who had escaped the misery of the Great Depression. Inside, she spoke with the manager. He was officious and thanked her coldly for her honesty. The manager rewarded my Mum’s good turn with a tin of stale, broken biscuits.

Mum fled the store, ashamed and furious that her honesty had paid her so unjustly. Her good deed was valued by the store’s manager to be worth no more than a tin of broken biscuits in a city where children were dying from hunger.

My mother spent that night in bitter silence, locked in a hateful glare towards the tin of broken biscuits.

The following morning, Mum returned with me to the department store and held the tin like a neck being throttled. At the store, she demanded to see the manager. An obsequious attendant asked if the manager would know the reason for her visit.

“He, bloody will."

When the manager appeared, Mum slammed the tin of broken biscuits down on a counter table by the till with so much force other customers stopped and looked for what caused the noise.

My mother shouted at the manager.

“You can take these bloody things back, ”

Aghast, the manager asked.

“Back? But why?”

“I found fifty pounds of your money yesterday. You think a few broken biscuits are fair compensation for my kindness to your store?”

The manager arrogantly and dismissively replied.

“Yes.”

“Bollocks, my good deed is worth at least five pounds.”

“Five pounds? But that is a lot of money.”

“It’s much less than losing fifty pounds.”

With a haughty disgust, the manager responded.

“I can’t possibly…”

My mother pushed up close to the manager's face.

“Look, give me a just reward, or I am going to scream that you throw crumbs to a poor mother with two little kids to feed and a sick husband to care for.”

The manager was flustered and looked confused that someone so abysmally poor as my mother would demand more than she was given.

He finally relented because the other customers began to notice my Mum’s outrage.

The manager gave my Mum four pounds under the condition she never returned.

It was a glorious victory for my mother. For the rest of her life, Mum told anyone willing to hear the story about the day she won against the Toffs.

The money she had wrestled from the store manager for returning their deposit bag kept us fed and housed for two months.

My mother was proving to everyone that she had the grit to drag our family to safety during the harsh economic times of the 1930s.

Mum didn’t set out to abandon my father for another man. But The Great Depression forced many in the working class, including my mother, to do things outside of their character to survive. Love cannot be nourished on an empty stomach.

Daily in our doss, I saw how people betrayed one another for a morsel of food in the 1930s. It was no different with my family because hunger gnawed at the bonds that held us together. Self-preservation will always take the upper hand in desperate moments.

In the winter of 1930, Mum knew our Dad was a dead weight. His work injury left him unemployable and made him a liability to our ability to weather the economic storms ahead.. My mother believed Dad would drown us all if he was not jettisoned from our lives. In that era, my mother's only hope to ensure her children didn't starve was to find another man capable of earning his scratch. The problem was Mum was as bad at picking men as my uncle was at picking winning horses.

It was rotten luck that my mother crashed into the orbit of a handsome, quick-talking Irish navvy named O’Sullivan when he arrived as a lodger at our doss house. Maybe if he had chosen another place to kip, my father’s fate would have been kinder than what happened to him within a year of O’Sullivan meeting my mother.

This navvy wooed Mum into his bed with compliments, jokes, flirtation and the cruellest trick of all the promise of a better tomorrow.

O'Sullivan carried himself like a soldier and was sure of himself. The economic crash hadn’t stolen his sense of self-worth. Confidence was- an aphrodisiac for Mum, who had lost hers after too many midnight flits.

O’Sullivan made Mum smile and laugh, and despite my early age, I knew she liked him more than she should. Sometimes, she didn’t come back to sleep in our room at night, and there were whispers from other lodgers about the sin of fornication.

For Mum, O’Sullivan’s attentions were like a life preserver thrown to a drowning person. She reciprocated his affections and longed to be with him. She resented the time spent in my father's company and became more acerbic and cruel to him.

Nightly under the spluttering glow of our one gas light that was bolted onto a greasy wall, Mum cursed Dad for leading her into a life of harsh poverty. Dad did not fight back but instead apologised for his age, infirmities and the things that were not his fault.

Dad saying sorry was not enough for my mother. She resented my father because she was the one who begged, borrowed, and stole to ensure that my sister and I had some morsel of food for our tea each night. Mum was the one who went to charity shops and pleaded for clothing for me and Alberta.

Mum was the one who obtained for me the worn corduroy trousers that were stained with the piss from its former owner at the St Vincent De Paul mission.

“I am the one who eats the shit for thee,” was Mum's response if anyone dared to question any of her decisions that affected our family.

Falling in love with O'Sullivan allowed my mother to escape the harsh reality of the world we lived in. But it was more fantasy than fact.

My mother deluded herself into believing a new life could be at hand for her and her kids with this attractive young workman who promised her a life of plenty down south. She ignored the reality that she was already married to my father, who, although disabled, was very much alive.

In the 1930s, working-class women rarely obtained a divorce because of the cost and the moral hypocrisy of that era. Facts, however, didn’t stop my mum, and she did all that she could to make herself become more than a fling to O’Sullivan.

Although she went about it most peculiarly because her Irish lover didn’t seem to my childish eyes to be a man of any faith, save for that of self-preservation and taking, damn the consequences, what he could from others.

It got into Mum’s head that if her children were the religion of her lover, it might be easier to pass us all off as a family unit. My mother was plotting ahead and reasoned that my dad could be abandoned- while she, Alberta and I would live with O’Sullivan outside of Yorkshire.

To aid in this fiction, my mother had me and my sister converted to Catholicism whilst she, a sinner, stayed far away from any confessional.

Yet it was not just lust that drove my mum to embrace the Church of Rome. Mum had heard that the catholic church in Bradford provided better food parcels than the Church of England.

I remember my first day at that catholic school and being terrified by the priests whose faces were whisky-red from too many nights of cards and cigarettes. I soon learned it was not the priests you should fear but the nuns who taught me my catechism.

Sister Christine was the nun I learned to fear more than anything else because she seemed charged by God himself to deliver his wrath against me. Sister Christine was a dour, unhappy character who took no joy in beauty or children.

One day at school, the Sister instructed our class to draw an apple that sat on a table. Like a creeping Jesus, the Sister moved around the room on rubber-soled shoes to inspect the drawing prowess of each student as if she were a judge at an art competition.

When Sister Christine came and inspected my drawing of the apple, she was not pleased. The nun said with disgust. It was sloppy, smudged an insult to her and God. Not satisfied with verbal barbs, the Sister, so outraged by my drawing, struck me with a strap across my forehead. The strength and ferocity of the blow made me black out for a moment. When I came to, I wept in pain, fear, and humiliation.

My mother noticed upon my return from school the bruised whelp on my forehead. She asked how it happened and I told her the mark was from Sister Christine hitting me.

It outraged Mum that a stranger dared to physically punish a child of hers. The following morning, my mother went to school with me to exact retribution from Sister Christine.

“I hear you’ve been disciplining our Harry for not meeting your fancy apple approval.” Sister Christine obfuscated and claimed I had been acting out in class.

“Sister, mark my words, touch my boy again; I will beat you black and blue with my very hands.”

Upon leaving, my mother said to the nun, whose mouth was agape in surprise and fear, “Justice is mine sayeth the lord.”

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 48 hours 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