Revolution is difficult because everything is monitored and dissent against the wealthy is punished swiftly
In part, this substack is about an odyssey through the hostile badlands of capitalism by those I loved the most, my family. People should not be alone in their joy or sorrow because living well or living harshly is a collective experience. Hopefully, this substack provides encouragement. Afterall, if a working-class revolution in the 1940s could bring about a Welfare State, something similar but fitted to our digital age can also be achieved through another people’s revolution. It’s just going to be more difficult this time. Our means of employment are more splintered than in the past, where vast swaths of labour could be unionised and then mobilised to fight against their oppression from the entitled classes. Now, we live in a surveillance state where everything is monitored and dissent against the wealthy is punished swiftly and without mercy. It’s not a hopeless situation but this struggle may only produce results long after we are dead. I don’t know.
Since COVID, cancer and being poor struck, I have lived an isolated life. But I don’t find it lonely because as long as I am connected through this substack to so many people and also take my daily long walks, I feel like I am attached to humanity in the best of ways.
I have to drop the last chapter excerpt from the Green and Pleasant Land but its final editing isn't complete. It should be ready tomorrow. But in the meantime, Harry’s story jumps ahead to 1948. In this excerpt, he talks of being demobbed from the RAF and how Britain is an island of hope and disappointment. The Welfare State is being built but there is unhappiness and infighting. There is a feeling in the people that peace may be short changing them when it comes to leisure and creature comforts.
Rent day is tomorrow, and I am almost there $248 CAD separates me from the guarantee of a roof over my head for the next month. So if you are able and only able, your tips or subscriptions are most welcome. By the way, I apologise for needing to do this. Take care, John.
Post-war darkness felled Britain during the winter of 1948, and happiness, like sweets, was tightly rationed. Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, The Blitz, The D-Day Landings, and even Churchill’s V for victory were long past. They were like points of light flickering in the night sky, distant and far away. In our present age of austerity, those events of derring-do and struggle felt more like myths about a long-ago civilisation, rather than Britain only 5 years before. The country and we had aged into peace with optimism and hope but the honeymoon with it was now over.
The beer started to grow stale for people like me in the working class not long after the articles of absolute surrender were signed by the Nazis, and the troops demobbed. We had lost too much in the war to return to our shriven lives of 1939.
In the July 1945 General Election, we sent Churchill and his Tory government on their bikes and voted Labour. We put a boot up their tory arses, and rejoiced in the downfall of the conservatives because it gave us hope that maybe an era for ordinary people had begun.
We believed Prime Minister Attlee would change Britain. A Labour government could, with our help, build a new country for us. One where people like me born on the wrong side of the tracks, the slums, or near the mills and factories of industrialised Britain finally got our rightful share of our nation's prosperity.
But there was a problem because by 1948; Britain, like Babylon, the Hittites, Athens, or Rome, had its chips. Britain’s moment of greatness had faded into the stratosphere. We were haemorrhaging in red ink and past due notices, and our debts were not to be forgiven or forgotten by those who lent us the credit to combat evil. Ordinary British people accepted that the debt had to be paid and tightened their belts, already near their last notch.
Post-war austerity measures were introduced, and food rationing continued as if the fight against Hitler had never stopped. We were still in it all together. Well, at the least- the working classes; and even lower middle classes were in it all together. They accepted peacetime material privations- under the knowledge that a Welfare State was being constructed as it ensured our aspirations for a better future.
The entitled hated Britain's demise as an empire, and they hated taxes levied against them to pay for the construction of a more equal nation. They hated most of all, that pragmatic socialism was slowly scraping away their inherited unearned privileges that for centuries had been theirs by right of birth and wealth.
In 1948, after almost three years of Labour government, conservatives, press barons and toffs were incensed over every alteration Attlee made to better the fabric of our society. They couldn't abide by the nationalising of key industries or the construction of public housing that didn't enrich the landlord class. They were even outraged by the arrival of the NHS because, to them, good healthcare was a benefit exclusive to those who could afford it not miners or their families who subsisted on fifty pounds a year.
Three years after World War Two; we were still a far distance away from becoming a country, where the people mattered more than the wealth of the few.
So, despite the revolutionary talk, from the green benches in the House of Commons, about giving the common man his due, I feared it would never arrive for me and my kind in any lasting measure.
I knew the ruling classes had spent the last thousand years building their power, wealth and control over politics. One election win for us wasn't going to wrest control from them and put it into the hands of ordinary people from my background. It was not in the interests of the moguls, the aristocrats, or the royals to surrender their wealth to the masses to build an egalitarian society. No matter what bills or laws Labour passed or were about to pass, in the House, the ruling class was going to bitterly oppose it as they believed God had showered them with the right to rule us.
Perhaps, I should have been more optimistic about the forty-eighth year of the twentieth century. But even though I was about to turn twenty-five, I felt very old. Hunger as a child and living through a world war in my teens and early twenties will do that to you. It made me suspect that a worker's life will always go pear-shaped in a society that values profit before the rights of ordinary workers.
18 hours before rent day and it’s a small SOS because 3 new subscribers will put me over the line.
Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. Your subscriptions are crucial 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 comorbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because we are in the same boat. Take Care, John