To Everything, There Is a Season-Final Writings From the World's Oldest Rebel

Below are some of the last words written by my Dad, when he was 94, in his last published book Don’t Let My Past Be My Future. He was frustrated and pissed off by this point in his Harry's Last Stand project because much of the mainstream media had cancelled him over his support and loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn. But he thought it was important to speak out for as long as possible about the evils of neoliberalism and for the rights of refugees. I think that is why when he was literally on his deathbed, in an ICU he agreed to see Canada's Minister for Immigration and Refugees to give him a bollocking.

Before my father died in 2018, he spent the previous decade using the history of his life and working-class contemporaries as a political canvas to paint the dangers of unfettered capitalism for humanity and democracy. He correctly predicted that without a return to socialist politics- fascism and wealth inequality would destroy not just our society but civilisation itself.

His unfinished history, The Green & Pleasant Land, is part of that project, along with the five other books written during his last years.

For the last year, I have been refining and editing The Green And Pleasant Land to meet my dad’s wishes. Below are more chapter excerpts from it. The final chapters are soon to be made available and it wasn’t planned. But it seems his 1945 will unfold here on SubStack through March, April and May, 80 years after they occurred.

I have also included a tip jar for those able to assist me in this project.

I am offering a 20% reduction on a yearly subscription to this SubStack because I am still scrambling to make the rent with three days to go.

Beta copies of The Green and Pleasant Land are almost ready, and for anyone who wants one. Send me a DM, and I will put you on the list.

To Everything, There Is a Season

I began this book when I was ninety-three and now at ninety-four, I have finished it. The seeds of this book were planted in me a long time ago when I was in my teens and I would ride my bike out to the moors near Halifax to be alone with my thoughts. There, I would put pen to paper to try to understand the injustices my family, my generation and my class endured because Britain was governed by and for elites. I wasn’t radical then and I am not now. But I knew that if you ignored the pleas of ordinary folk who cried out for good jobs, decent homes and a decent future, social unrest would follow.

My long and generally happy and productive life only happened because the welfare state was created by a Labour government when I was twenty-two. It’s why what I endured through my childhood is now a malevolent ghost that haunts my mind and will do so until I breathe no more.

I am an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. I am one of the last remaining voices from an era when Britain was savage and brutal to all those who did not have wealth. Now when I shave in the morning and look at the skin on my face broken and cracked with age and my hands thin and frail, I wonder to myself what became of that young man who survived the Great Depression, and what happened to that Britain that delivered from the ashes of war brought peace and economic security to its citizens.

The young man and Britain as a compassionate nation are no more. Neo-liberalism has turned the welfare state into Bolton Abbey. It has become a beautiful pile of rubble. It was exposed to the indifference of successive governments, including Labour, for too long. Moreover, this generation has allowed the 1 per cent to steal its birthright and that can’t continue for much longer without Britain returning to my past. And if we in the twenty-first century are forced to return to my past because the Tories have successfully murdered the welfare state, it will be more brutal and bloodier for you than it was for me so many years ago. This time there will be no mercy because the state will be able to monitor and control all facets of your life; our entire lives can be traced, from our use of mobiles and emails to comments on social media to purchases via credit cards and the use of loyalty cards. Anonymity has gone, and the state has the weaponry for social control at its fingertips because the teach oligarchs will provide it for them.

It will be impossible to resist and mobilise like we did in the 1930s and 1940s. You must begin to act now because tomorrow it could be too late. Everything that we have today in terms of social benefits originates from those six years when Labour was in government after the war. Without the Atlee government, Britain would have been a dark and fearful place during the second half of the twentieth century. And yet many of our citizens are ignorant of history and made arrogant by the fake news of the right-wing, which disparages the accomplishments we made as a nation when we cleared the slums, gave free healthcare to all, built affordable homes and made higher education accessible to working-class kids. We shouldn’t be where we are today as a people and society.

A million people should not need food banks to keep their bellies full. Politics has failed the people and now too many are turning to right-wing populists the way the poor once flocked to snake-oil salesmen to cure their ailments. All our political parties are at fault and should be ashamed, but some are guiltier than others. Farage is a fraud. He can no more offer political salvation to the disenfranchised masses than a television evangelist can fast-track you to heaven with a £100 donation to his dodgy ministry. And it is time the media and other political parties stopped paying lip service to their twenty-first-century variant of Mosley’s fascism. As for the Tories, their concept of aspirational politics is a cruel deceit. Toryism is no more than an elaborate pyramid scheme where they convince everyone to steal from the low est to keep their place in the hierarchy.

I have not lost faith in left-wing politics despite my disappointments with many of the leaders who have championed its causes over the decades but were felled by either narcissism or weakness of spirit. The world we live in today is rife with corruption, populism and economic sectarianism. This is a harbinger of worse things to come. If we do not fight against austerity, the gradual privatisation of the NHS or our addiction to fake news, we will be frog-marched back to my childhood, where no one lived well except the rich.

I know my moment on this earth is almost done. I will soon join my mother, father, sisters, brothers, wife, son and friends who have passed on before me. I have tried to tell you what I have learned and seen through my many years of living. It will be up to you to decide whether you fight for sunlight or submit to darkness. I am too old now to do much more but tell the truth about the history of my generation. To survive, live well and enjoy love, you must choose the path of your ancestors. In you is the blood of all those who fought for fair wages, housing, and healthcare and defended our island against the tyranny of Hitler. In you is the light that your grandparents had when they fought to preserve and expand civil society through the welfare state. If you do not call upon the wisdom and the spirit of my generation, you will regress to an era when want and ignorance were as deadly as a pestilence to Britain.

I can’t make that decision for you. I have shown you what that world looked like when the 1 per cent enslaved an entire generation to feed their greed. It is now up to you because the sunset has come to my life, but you must not let it come to our country. It shouldn’t be this way. It should be better for you. You deserve more than the second-rate politics of Theresa May and the third-rate lives many lead because of austerity. I was born in the darkest of times, and it seems because of Donald Trump that I will exit this world in a similar era of uncertainty, inequality and cruelty.

Right now, we are at a juncture in history that is as dangerous to this generation as the 1930s were to mine. There are serious threats of war emerging all across the globe, some caused by the folly of neo-liberalism and others just erupting because we forgot that tyranny, if fed, will metastasise in even the healthiest of societies. It is your choice now to decide whether you let the jungles of greed, neo-liberalism and corporations grow over and obscure the welfare state like vines and forest growth obscured the great Mayan civilisations a millennium ago, or you can reclaim your birthright-a Welfare State.

It’s a bit of an SOS with days left before rent day. About 4 new subscribers will put it 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