The Decline & Fall of Western Democracies in 2023 was foretold by the Bank Crash of 2009

The selection below is from my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land. It was unfinished at the time of his death. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards. The fifth anniversary of Harry Leslie Smith is November 28th, I hope to have the first 50k words of this work ready for you to read by then.

For most of my life, I believed my experiences as a young man before the Welfare State weren’t that unique. Everyone I knew had similar stories of loss and hardship. If they hadn’t been affected by the Great Depression, they found their sorrow during the Second World War. I looked at the road ahead of me instead of behind because it was just too painful to linger in the past.

However, after the financial crash of 2009, I couldn’t ignore the events that happened to me during the Great Depression. I couldn’t look away because the banks hadn’t been this near total ruin since 1929.

My history, the history of my generation, seemed more relevant than ever. I was overwhelmed by ancient memories of soup kitchens, midnight flits, and living on the rough side of society.

In my imagination, I kept seeing and tasting the images of squalor from my youth. I smelled again the aroma of hopelessness that hung over my childhood and everyone in working-class Britain like a putrid fog that didn’t begin to lift until the winds of war blew it all away in 1939.

It all came back to me with a vibrancy that was both sad and profound while I sat alone in a Portuguese pastilleria and washed down a custard tart with a strong espresso coffee.

Austerity was back and this time it was coming for the young of the 21st century who didn't come from families of entitlement.

Britain and America may have bailed out the banks, but the financial stability of individuals was all eaten away by both personal debt and precarious work. It felt like it was 1929 except this time there was social media to document the collapse of the economy. But in the 21st century, there was no FDR on the horizon to initiate a New Deal for the people. At first, I thought Obama might have been like Roosevelt and saved ordinary people through honest work projects and economic reform. Instead, Obama protected the wealth of the richest citizens through Quantitative easing as well as by failing to prosecute any of the banking executives who destroyed the world’s economy out of personal greed and sheer incompetence.

Last orders were called on the social welfare state and democracy because the 1% just wasn’t about to share their untaxed wealth to get us out of this jam. If society wanted to fix this horrific crime against ordinary humanity we'd have to demand more from our leaders than platitudes. But society didn't because the news media pushed its discontent into hating the vulnerable, the different and the refugee. That is how we stumbled into our present reality, where fascism is ascending whilst democracy dying.

Every day, on the deserted beaches of Albufeira in the desolate month of January 2010, I walked alone in dread and fear for today's generation. In between the crash of the Atlantic’s winter surf, I felt the tide of my own sad history drag me under its strong current. I couldn't shake the realisation that

history was repeating itself, and I didn't have an abundance of time to sufficiently warn people of the dangers that lay ahead for our world if we didn't fight against the forces who would use this crisis to eradicate the Welfare State.

On those waves breaking against the shore, I kept on seeing my past life rolling in, and it always came back to my childhood and places like Sowerby Bridge.

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My mum tried to paint our move to Sowerby Bridge as a step up but in many ways, our new abode wasn’t our salvation but our doom.

She’d rented a desolate outbuilding on a small farm that seemed to be located on the highest hill in the Town of Sowerby Bridge. It was more horrific and primordial than our previous doss. The outbuilding had been converted two decades before our arrival into a primitive cottage for a farm labourer and his family. However, as the last occupant had recently committed suicide by hanging himself on a metal hook that jutted high out on the entrance wall, the farm owner was willing to rent it to my mother at a more affordable rate. When, I came back from school or my work as a coal delivery boy to these Spartan quarters; I stared up at that hook and thought of the man hanging lifeless by the front door and how hopeless my existence felt to me. The cottage was made out of hard cold stone and lacked gas lighting, so we relied upon cheap candles to keep darkness at bay in the evening. It felt like you were living in an unfriendly cave, like early man did thousands of years ago.

It was not comfortable to live in that cottage, and Bill’s rage at society for making him live in the “bloody muck,” made sure there was no love in our new home.

Like a sore tooth that couldn’t be pulled Bill’s temper seemed to get more cantankerous in that dismal, squalid, place. He was always drunk, and as we rarely could afford a proper ration of coal- our bones were perpetually damp from a draft that slipped in under the door and burrowed deep into our blood as a termite drives through wood.

The threat of Bill becoming violent hung in the air like thunder in a humid afternoon summer sky. In that barren cottage, I always felt apprehensive, nervous, hungry and sickly.

At tea time each night, Bill would wash down his meal with rum bought at the off-license on his way back from his shift at the rendering plant. Bill drank it from a reused jam jar- whilst his other hand rolled a cheap course tobacco cigarette that he lit with a match that he struck from off the sole of his boot. At the start of each drinking session, Bill sang sea shanties that he had learned in the Navy during the First World War.

But on each evening, as his drinking progressed, the songs became darker. With each swig from his jam jar, it was like watching a bomb being primed to explode.

It's a big ask, I know, but I need your help. I got sick with a mild infection last month. Even being slightly ill put me financially behind and my rent is due next week. I know how bad it was recovering from cancer during covid but then I had some savings. If I get another major illness, I will sink like a stone.

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Next month, my early pension begins. It is not much,. I couldn't live off it but it adds to the base that keeps me housed.

Right now, at around 1100 subscribers, with 10% as paid, I need to increase my subscription base to 3k or double my paid subscriber base for an income of $14k (Canadian).

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