Keir Starmer: NHS Slayer
Harry Leslie Smith’s Past Became Our Present
Things have been falling apart in Britain since the era of Margaret Thatcher. State infrastructure has been starved of public investment so that it becomes inefficient, incompetent, and inadequate for the needs of society. This is neoliberalism’s grand plan: to privatise every aspect of the state, from healthcare to education. It renders the average citizen not a serf but a helot to landlords who own every manner of human endeavour.
Keir Starmer is a Prime Minister who has done profound harm to Britain’s democracy and society. The banality of evil could be his political mission statement. He is not a coward but a cynic whose only identity is the wielding of power. It is a bitter irony that Starmer will be the Prime Minister who puts the last nail in the NHS’s coffin before it becomes privatised.
The Junior Doctors’ strike is now in its fifth day, and this job action is scheduled to end on April 13. If trade unionism had any teeth left, it would be staging sympathy strikes with the doctors. But that isn’t going to happen in this age, where the sun sets on neoliberalism and the dawn rises on a new fascist era.
My father stood with Junior Doctors during their strike action in 2015 and 2016. He travelled the country, speaking on their behalf. When he couldn’t, he sent video messages, like the one embedded below.
It would have outraged him that all those Labour MPs and journalists who wept over his 2014 NHS speech now collaborate in the downfall of public healthcare in Britain. Below is the text of my father’s speech—a reminder of what is at stake in 2026 and why the people must force a general strike to topple this government.
24 September, Manchester, United Kingdom
As you can see, I’m not athletic.
I came into this world in the rough and ready year of 1923. I am from Barnsley, and I can tell you that my childhood, like so many others from that era, was not an episode from Downton Abbey. Instead, it was a barbarous time, it was a bleak time, and it was an uncivilised time because public healthcare didn’t exist.
Back then, hospitals, doctors, and medicine were for the privileged few because they were run for profit rather than as a vital state service that keeps a nation’s citizens and workers fit and healthy.
My memories stretch back almost a hundred years, and if I close my eyes, I can smell the poverty that oozed from the dusky tenement streets of my boyhood.
I can taste on my lips the bread and drippings I was served for my tea. I can remember extreme hunger and my parents’ undying love for me. In my heart, I can still feel my mum and dad’s desperation as they tried to keep our family safe and healthy in the slum we called home.
Poor mum and dad, no matter how hard they tried to protect my sisters and me, the cards were stacked against them because common diseases prowled our neighbourhoods and snuffed out life like a cold breath on a warm candle flame.
I still remember hearing, while I played as a child on my street, the anguished cries that floated from a window on my boyhood street. They were the screams from a woman dying from cancer who couldn’t afford morphine to ease her passage from this life.
No one in our community was safe from poor health, sickness, and disease. In our home, TB came for my oldest sister, Marion, who was the apple of my dad’s eye. It is why her sickness and his inability to pay for her medicine or the best care broke his heart.
Tuberculosis tortured my sister and left her an invalid who had to be restrained with ropes tied to her bed. My parents did everything in their power to keep Marion alive and comfortable. Still, they just didn’t have the dosh to get her to the best clinics, doctors, or medicines. Instead, she wasted away before our eyes until my mother could no longer handle her care, and she was dispatched to our workhouse infirmary, where she died 87 years ago. Mum and Dad couldn’t afford to bury their darling daughter, so, like the rest of our country’s indigent, she was dumped nameless into a pauper’s pit.
My family’s story isn’t unique; sadly, rampant poverty and no healthcare were the norm for the Britain of my youth. That injustice galvanised my generation to become, after the Second World War, the tide that raised all boats.
It is why, for me in 1945, after a long, hard Great Depression and a savage and brutal war, at the age of 22 and still in the RAF, I voted for the first time.
Election Day 1945 was one of the proudest days in my life. I felt that I was finally getting a chance to grab destiny by the shirt collar, and that is why I voted for Labour and the creation of the NHS.
As I stand here today, my heart is with all of those people from my generation who didn’t make it past childhood, didn’t get an education, grow as individuals, marry, raise a family, and enjoy the fruits of retirement because they died needlessly and too early in another era of austerity. But my heart is also with the people of the present, who, because of welfare cuts and austerity measures, are struggling once more to make ends meet, and whose futures I fear for.
Today, we must be vigilant, we must be vocal, and we must demand that the NHS remains an institution for the people and by the people. We must never let the NHS slip from our grasp because if we do, your future will be my past. I am not a politician, a member of the elite, or a financial guru, but my life is your history—and we should keep it that way. So say it loud and say it clear in this hall and across this country:
Mr Cameron, keep your mitts off my NHS.
My father’s 2014 speech to the Labour Party conference epitomises his philosophy and vision of what makes both a good nation and good citizens.
In the 12 years since he made that speech, Britain and the rest of the West have veered so far off course that it is unlikely most of us will see the return of functioning democracy in our lifetime.
Your support and encouragement make this Substack possible. Your efforts have kept the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive. It has made it possible for me to continue the work my father and I began in 2010. Your tips and subscriptions literally put food on my table and pay for my prescription medication, which is why there is another fire sale on subscriptions today, owing to delays in royalty payments from the publisher and a few long-time subscribers being unable to continue their support. So it is 50% off today.
Thank you.