Labour Party Conference 2024 "Triumph of the Shill."

Ageing and dying are the curse of time. During the past decade, I was surprised by joy, and seasoned by grief. Now I am enraged as I have never been in my entire life at the theft of hope by neoliberals like Keir Starmer.

There was still room for optimism in September 2014, when the Labour Party led by Ed Miliband had its party conference in Manchester.

You could still believe then, that citizens' lives can be transformed for the better by a change in government. 10 years on Keir Starmer has provided a crash course for Britain that neoliberal politics is as immutable to reform as communism was in the Soviet Union.

It's Liverpool this year for the Labour Party conference that begins on Sunday. But delegates, journalists and shills are already checking into their hotels for preconference booze-ups, where they will scheme to feather their own nests in this fourteenth year of austerity. Labour has already issued decrees that the word genocide about Israel's relentless massacre of Palestinians is forbidden to be spoken by delegates when they address conference attendees. Declassified UK, a news organisation known for investigative journalism that is unkind to the establishment was also banned from attending the conference.

If my dad were alive, I know he wouldn’t have been invited to speak at this year’s conference like he was at the Labour Party conference in 2014. But then again, today's Labour bears no resemblance to the Labour Party of my father's youth that built public healthcare. It is a 3d printed version of the conservative party. Political leadership in Britain and around the Western world can't be deemed anymore to be politics for and by the people. It's beige authoritarianism that takes its marching orders from the 1%.

My dad was born in 1923 and supported a socialist Labour Party his entire life. But the first and only Labour Party conference he attended was when he was 91 in 2014. Until that year, my dad was a political nobody and happy in his anonymity.

My father, however, stopped being a political nobody at the age of 90. He was pissed off over the dismantling of the Welfare State by centre and right-wing political parties. So, he began to speak out on social media about what awaited society if we didn't save the Welfare State. It led to a book deal but it should always be remembered it took 3 self published books before Harry’s Last Stand to light a flame under the arses of the main stream publishing world.

People began to take notice of Harry Leslie Smith including some in the Labour Party. He was invited to speak at the 2014 party conference because then Labour was a Big Tent and still had room for socialism.

Even Blairites liked my Dad because they thought they could manipulate his greatest generation's aura for their own selfish purposes and never deliver upon his call to rebuild the Welfare State for the 21st century. They would learn soon enough my father was not for turning. He was cancelled by them once they seized the reigns of power through the political destruction of Jeremy Corbyn.

My dad was only supposed to do that one fringe event at the 2014 Labour Party Conference and be gone. But my father’s fringe speech about what it was like growing up Working Class before the Welfare State. It was so well received that Labour invited him to give a speech about the NHS to party delegates in the main hall.

The day before my dad’s speech, The Mirror set up a meet and greet with Labour’s then-leader Ed Miliband which didn’t go well because both men were tired. They looked each other up and down as if to say: “Why the hell am I wasting my time with the other when I have a speech to prepare.” My father also concluded from meeting Ed that had he become Prime Minister he would have broken most of his promises to those who wanted a more centre-left government.

The speech my dad gave at the 2014 Labour Party conference was a great political triumph for a man who only wanted to give voice to the voiceless from his generation. Finally, someone from the working class who had lived through the horrors of the Great Depression told the Labour Party: “Don’t make my past your future.”

And, it resonated with them. The day after my dad gave that speech, he was on the front page of all major British newspapers. Over the next 48 hours, news producers requested interviews for their outlets in Britain, Canada, and the USA. The Independent said, with a picture of my dad on their front page:

“Finally, Labour has found its voice.”

But wealthy neoliberals and the news media class silenced that voice and the voices of Jeremy Corbyn and thousands of other ordinary people.

The coming Labour Party conference will be an orgy of cynicism and contempt for ordinary human life at home and abroad.

It didn't have to be this way. It became so because the news media and the political class believe that democracy should only belong to the better-paid among us.

Here is the speech my dad gave and would certainly not be allowed to give to the Labour Party Conference. It’s not the full speech because it’s hard to find that online now because Keir Starmer’s Labour Government I presume is erasing it from memory.

It's a bit of an ask, I know. All of you have been great supporters of this project. But I was left in a small bind. Long story short, I need to pay for some medication today and my internet. It would have been fine and is not anyone's fault, outside of neoliberalism. But a few subscribers, because times are tough, couldn't cover their renewal subscription fees. It's so understandable in these times. But as I counted my eggs before they were hatched it left me in a lurch.