There will be blood because neoliberalism is as deaf to the people's needs as the Romanov's once were to the aspirations of Russia.

Harry Leslie Smith

February 25, 1928-November 28, 2018

This day marks the fifth year my dad's been dead. The distance covered, the footfalls I made- since that moment when the light in his consciousness extinguished itself like a burst from a camera flashbulb in the 1950s after a Paparazzi took his shot- wasn't as far as I wanted to travel.

Life had other plans for me and society. In 2023, An unpleasant normal shares existence with us. It won't leave us alone or take the hint we want our old life back when we still had hope that a better future could be carved out from a neoliberal landscape. We live now in the days of Eeyore, where suspicion, distrust of happy endings and the ominous sense that the proverbial other shoe is soon to drop are the correct mindset.

During these past five years of dystopia, we survived a pandemic that really isn't over and a cost of living crisis that is getting worse, not better. The climate emergency has made our earth as wretched as a patient suffering from Ebola and bleeding out from all of its orifices. But we are told the 1% who, through their greed, created the conditions for humanity's extinction will solve it.

Since my dad died, so much fascism has washed over society and been normalised by the entitled class who own our politics, places of work, popular culture and the streams of content that inform us. Truth is whatever they want it to be now, and anyone who questions the 1%'s authority to manipulate democracy and make it a tool that only benefits top-income earners is derided or gaslit to shut them up.

 We couldn't even get back to the dysfunctionality of 2018 without incredible amounts of civil disobedience and, sadly, violence- which I neither encourage- nor condone.

In those last years of my Dad's life, I generally believed society could bloodlessly make a course correction towards a politics that was economically egalitarian. Not anymore because the disconnect between the desperation of the many with the plentiful lives of the upper middle class and beyond is too wide a chasm.

Life expectancy in all Western nations has declined since 2018 for ordinary people. In five years millions more in Britain live in destitution, and Millions live in unsafe housing. It's not different in Canada, the USA, Australia or the EU. 

Homelessness is so ubiquitous and tragic now that it wouldn't be out of place in a chapter of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in any Western city of town.

In the five years since my father's death, the West doesn't even pay lip service to ending the refugee crisis. Instead, it has fallen into the footsteps of fascism by dehumanising refugees and considering them a scourge that should be thankful if they get entry into our countries and can sleep on the pavements of our great "democratic," cities.

Five years after my father's death the world is fighting two American proxy wars one in Europe, the other in Gaza. The bloodshed is incalculable and has pushed us into a dark place that we won't leave without much upheaval.

The world has been broken by neoliberalism. It's unlikely I will be alive in five years to commemorate the 10th anniversary of my father's death. But until the morning when I wake up dead, I will continue this Last Stand.

What my dad and I did during those eight years between Peter’s death and his was find a road to our redemption, and that was Harry’s Last Stand.

All the books, the tours, the podcast, the speeches, the interviews were more about our love for each other and those that had been in our lives than anything else. Did we tilt at windmills during those last years? Yes, we did. Did we change anything in the world? Probably not, but it was worth the bloody try. And during it and after it, nothing fucking else mattered but that love we had for each other. So, go well into the night, Dad. Go well into the good night, Mum, and go well into the good night, Pete. I may join you sooner rather than later. But whatever its final length, my life was a most splendid, purposeful, joyful ride. Being able to look back on all our lives. I feel like Howard Carter, after he first peered into Tutankhamun's tomb and asked if he saw anything in the dark crypt, replied after he shone a lit torch inside. “Yes, wonderful things.”

Remember to subscribe if you can because I'd like to finish the job I started with him and remain housed. Getting a rather bad bout of cancer at the start of the pandemic, along with a diagnosis of lung disease, altered both the trajectory of my life and the prospects available to me. If I get 6 paid yearly subscriptions by the 30th, my rent is covered for next month.