In the 1920s, Harry Leslie Smith was shunted from one cold, dirty, overcrowded hovel to the next, fleeing by night when his father could no longer pay the rent.

When it comes to housing, we have moved beyond crisis in 21st-century Britain and snuggled up to catastrophe. Low wages, along with curtailed government benefits, have made more than 82,000 tenants two months in arrears on their rent. It’s worse for universal-credit tenants: three in four of them are in serious arrears for their lodgings.

The problem people face today was faced by their ancestors before the welfare state. I am living proof of this because I remember our flits. In January 1927, my family upped sticks in the freezing darkness because my dad just wasn’t able to pay our landlord his due. That first time we disappeared under dark clouds, my dad tapped my shoulder to wake me as I slept with my sister on a filthy mattress that stank of other people’s piss and sweat. My sister and I jumped from our bed, still dressed in shabby clothes provided by a local charity. We quietly shuffled downstairs in confused fright and into the night air.

All we took was what we could put into sacks and carry on our backs, like modern-day migrants. In an act of sentimentality or defiance against our fate, my dad brought with him an oil portrait of his father in an ornate gilded frame, which indicated that at one time our family had the luxury of adorning the walls of our home with painted mementoes of much-loved relatives. Along with the portrait, my father carried an eight-volume edition of the Harmsworth History of the World. I think he took those objects with us so that my sister Alberta and I would know that, even though he had been undone by an unequal economy, he once had greater ambitions and prospects for himself than fighting like an animal for scraps of food to keep his family fed.

Being homeless is in many ways like being orphaned because your moorings to love and security are cut and you are cast adrift into a torrent of uncertainty. As a child and teenager, I never felt secure in my housing or whether I’d be able to get a decent meal at the end of the day. The tenement we fled to in Barnsley in 1927 was smaller than the hovel we had left just one hurried step ahead of the bailiff. We had to share it with an elderly, childless couple. For the first few days, the fireplace grates were cold because our housemates were waiting for my parents to buy the fuel.

In truth, the house we moved into was no better than a stall for an animal in a poor farmer’s paddock. That we were forced to live this way in the past was unjust, but if you don’t think it is happening in today’s Britain, think again. Sky News reported in 2016 that one-third of private rented homes aren’t up to proper standards of health and safety. Moreover, three-quarters of a million homes are infested with rodents, are damp and have other problems that make them dangerous to dwell in. Yet the owners of these fleapits can earn a fortune in rent because 21st-century Britain is becoming as socially dystopian as it was in my boyhood.

Governments have encouraged both greed and the notion that housing is the best investment for those with disposable income, fuelling house-price and rent increases by speculation as well as a decline in affordable accommodation. Moreover, the Tory government in London, and Tory councils all across the country, have slashed regulations, making it easier to exploit those seeking affordable and safe housing.

As there were only two bedrooms in our new home, my family kipped together while our housemates slept in the other room. The four of us huddled on one small mattress under dirty blankets for warmth as if we were rabbits packed tight in a hutch being sold at Barnsley market.

Shortly after our arrival, the man who shared the house with us died and his widow moved out. She left carrying a cardboard suitcase and much later my mother told me she had made a vague promise, “like a bloody sailor”, to return and sort out her portion of the rent. Before she could make good on her word, my parents decided it was better for us to move on to an even less expensive and more inhospitable area. We never seemed to move far from where we started, and this time we ended up near the local tip. On most days, you could smell it festering from our stoop.

My sister would drag me to the tip in hope of finding lost treasure. There, we scampered through its ocean of rubbish looking for something to sell or barter like children now do in developing countries.

In the winter of early 1928, my family was undone by its greatest calamity when my dad was seriously injured in a mining accident. He was brought home to us on a barrow pulled by two mates. At first, my mother was relieved that he hadn’t been killed in a cave-in. For those who worked underground, death or injury at work was a normal occurrence.

Over time, my mum’s relief at my dad’s survival became clouded by her rage at being saddled with a man who couldn’t provide during an era when married women were not encouraged to work by the state, their families or potential employers.

My parents and the rest of the lower classes were being immersed in petty debt, lack of affordable housing and work shortages that were producing malnutrition, premature death and anxiety in epidemic quantity.

Sadly, not much has changed for many people since 1928 because 3.9 million British families are just one pay cheque away from insolvency, which means that should the breadwinners of households lose their income like my dad did, their prospects in Tory Britain may become as bleak as ours were almost a century ago. Many people just don’t know any more if they can keep their heads above water, and that’s a recipe for social disaster. Revolutions and civic unrest always develop after prolonged inequalities. Some, like the 1945 creation of our welfare state, are peaceful; others, like the Arab spring in 2010, are chaotic and brutal.

This is why everyone should be concerned by the 2016 presidential election in the US because, although it was a democratic vote that made Donald Trump president and gave power to his radical views on race, trade and diplomacy, it was also a revolution that upset the normal tide of government. The same has occurred in Britain with Brexit, and the question on everyone’s mind is: what will happen to our country once it is enacted? Will we see chaos, or progress?

Right now, the tipping point for our society might be the housing crisis. The threat of homelessness since the 2008 banking crisis has grown while the wages of the average worker have fallen. The Trades Union Congress, after analysing income data for the past nine years, has concluded that real income for average workers has declined by 1% each year since 2008: that is a 9% drop in earnings, whereas rent has increased over the same period by more than 2%, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Anyone who is an ordinary person in Britain is at risk of losing what little they’ve earned because, as the welfare state shrinks, housing becomes more expensive, dental care becomes unaffordable, higher education becomes out of reach. In fact, if you lose your job, or you or your loved ones get sick, you are at the mercy of a system that no longer empathises with your struggles because our Tory government is more concerned with preserving the entitlement of corporations to pay as little tax as possible to the state.

In seven years of government, the Tories have slashed corporate tax from 28% to 17%. In that same period of government, according to the Rowntree Foundation, the number of British people living in poverty has risen to 13.5 million. Moreover, the foundation has concluded that there are more than a million people in our country who are destitute and unable adequately to feed themselves or afford decent shelter.

It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that Britain isn’t walking into an egalitarian future under this Tory government. It is being frogmarched into an economic dystopia that has an eerie resemblance to the inequality I witnessed as a boy in the 1920s and 1930s, when poverty was the norm for working-class Britain. It’s why, despite all that is modern and beyond my aged grasp, I find the 21st century too familiar for my liking.

This is an edited extract from Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future by Harry Leslie Smith, published by Constable.

Source: The Guardian 17 May 2017

My generation is the last to remember the destitution of life in Britain before the NHS and the welfare state. Heed our warnings, before we are gone.

For me, a man who was born and bred in the harsh poverty of Britain after the first world war, it was inspiring. But what moved me most was the venue he chose to announce this manifesto of equality and fairness – because Bradford University is built on ground that, in my youth, was a site of great suffering and death.

You see, within the boundaries of what is now the university campus, my boyhood dreams and idealism were crushed under the cruel weight of austerity during the Great Depression. When I was young, this was not a place where one’s future was made but where it was condemned. The grounds that now hold this university contained a slum, and hope never penetrated its dark, enveloping canopy of destitution.

My family arrived in the neighbourhood that once covered this well-maintained university as penniless and jobless economic migrants from Barnsley in 1929. Then, it was an endless, warren-like landscape of dilapidated houses that nestled in cul-de-sacs where no one expected to enjoy either a decent or a long life because there was no welfare state or NHS. If hard luck struck, all that was available was poor relief, which paid a mean weekly stipend that guaranteed either starvation or homelessness.

My family couldn’t survive on poor relief, so we ended up living cheek by jowl in a doss house with a multitude of other desperate characters. Like us, all of them had been washed up on its doorstep like the flotsam that crashes on to a desolate beach after a terrible tempest. Soldiers from the first world war who had been promised a land fit for heroes by lying politicians resided in the doss where my family kipped. During the day, they still tried to hold themselves up bravely.

Like my dad, these Tommies looked for work in a city whose factories had been hushed by the collapse of the world’s economies. But at night when they tried to sleep, weary from unemployment and PTSD, I’d hear their cries of terror because their dreams had sent them back into battle at Ypres or the Somme.

As for me, my childhood was a nightmare of indentured servitude and malnutrition. At bedtime, my sister and I would huddle together for warmth on a piss-stained flock mattress on an unlit garret floor. We would try to quell the gnawing in our stomachs by wondering what our king had eaten for his tea that evening.

Even while playing, my boyhood was never blissful. In this part of Bradford I was always reminded that death for the poor is miserable, brutal and lonely: from open windows, I heard the inhuman howls of cancer sufferers dying in agony because poverty denied them the dignity of morphine.

But all of that changed in 1945 when, at the end of the second world war, the Labour party fought a general election on a manifesto that promised the creation of the NHS, affordable education, an end to that era’s housing crisis and fair conditions for all workers. The Labour party’s 2017 election manifesto echoes the sentiments found in Labour’s 1945 manifesto that inspired my generation to build a just society.

When I remember all the pain and sadness that once populated the part of Bradford that now houses its university, I can’t think of a better tribute to all those whose lives were blighted by the Great Depression than for Labour to have unfurled its manifesto here for the nation to see.

But I fear that the 2017 manifesto, no matter how just and how right for our times, may not catch the wind it needs to help this country sail forward to hope and prosperity because we have forgotten the hardships, tragedies and triumphs of my generation. It’s sad for me to ponder how on Remembrance Sunday people speak solemnly about their commitment to never forgetting those who fell in war, while those uncountable lives that were cut short because of economic injustice throughout the early part of the 20th century are forgotten.

I can tell you, as a very old man, that I am afraid for the future of ordinary people in Britain. Because by the time the next general election is scheduled, in 2022, most of those from my generation, who have survived for so long, will be dead or incapacitated. No one then may be left alive to remember the profound suffering, the hardship, the sorrow and the eventual victory all those nameless, ordinary people achieved in 1945 with election of a Labour government.

Forgetting them, and the lessons your parents or grandparents taught you from their lives about how to overcome austerity and build a proper and just society, will condemn you to something far worse than I experienced growing up.

Harry Leslie Smith ((25 February 1923 – 28 November 2018) grew up in 1930s Great Depression. He was a second world war veteran and, until his death at 95, he remained an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He wrote 3 books of memoirs and two books of political memoir. His most famous book is the highly acclaimed Harry’s Last Stand. His last book, published in 2017, was Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future.

Source: New Statesman

Harry Leslie Smith, 95-years-old, born into an impoverished mining family, recalls a Britain without a welfare state, now threatened with destruction by the Tories.

Hard work and poor wages didn’t turn my dad into a radical. They did, however, make him an idealist, because he believed that a fair wage, education, trade unions and universal suffrage were the means to a prosperous democracy. He endured brutal working conditions but they never hardened his spirit against his family or his comrades in the pits. Instead, the harsh grind of work made his soul as gentle as a beast of burden that toiled in desolate fields for the profit of others.

My mother, Lillian, however, was made of sterner stuff. She understood that brass, not love, made the world go round. So when a midwife with a love of gin and carbolic soap delivered me safely on a cold winter’s night in February 1923 into my mum’s exhausted arms, I was swaddled in her rough-and-ready love, which toughened my skin with a harsh affection. I was the first son but I had two elder sisters who had already skinned their knees and elbows in the mad fight to stay alive in the days before the social safety network. Later on, our family would include two half-brothers, after my mother was compelled to look for a more secure provider than my dad during the Great Depression.

By the time I was weaned from my mother’s breast, I had begun to learn the cruel lessons that the world inflicted on its poor. At the age of seven, my eldest sister, Marion, contracted tuberculosis, which was a common and deadly disease for those who lived hand to mouth in early-20th-century Britain. Her illness was directly spawned from our poverty, which forced us to live in a series of fetid slums.

Despite being a full-time worker, my dad was always one pay packet away from destitution. Several times, my family did midnight flits and moved from one decre­pit single-bedroom tenement to the next. Yet we never seemed to move far from the town’s tip, a giant wasteland stacked with rotting rubbish, which became a playground for preschool children.

At the beginning of my life, affordable health care was out of reach for much of the population. A doctor’s visit could cost the equivalent of half a week’s wages, so most people relied on good fortune rather than medical advice to see them safely through an illness. But luck and guile went only so far and many lives were snatched away before they had a chance to start. The wages of the ordinary worker were at a mere subsistence level and therefore medicine or simple rest was out of the question for many people.

Unfortunately for my sister, luck was also in short supply in our household. Because my parents could neither afford to see a consultant nor send my sister to a sanatorium, Marion’s TB spread and infected her spine, leaving her an invalid.

The 1926 General Strike, which began just as my sister started her slow and painful journey from life to death, was about more than wages to my dad and many others. It was called by the TUC in protest against mine owners who were using strong-arm tactics to force their workers to accept longer work hours for less take-home pay. At its start, it involved 1.7 million industrialised workers.

In essence, the strike was about the right of all people, regardless of their economic station, to live a dignified and meaningful life. My father joined it with enthusiasm, because he believed that all workers, from tram drivers to those who dug ore, deserved a living wage. But for my father the strike  was also about the belief that he might be able to right the wrongs done to him and his family; if only he had more money in his pay packet, he might have been able to afford decent health care for all of us.

Unfortunately, the General Strike was crushed by the government, which first bullied TUC members to return to their work stations. Eight months later, it did the same to the miners whose communities had been beggared by being on the pickets for so long. My dad and his workmates had to accept wage cuts.

I remember my sister’s pain and anguish during her final weeks of life in October 1926. I’d play beside her in our parlour, which was as squalid as an animal pen, while she lay on a wicker landau, tied down by ropes to prevent her from falling to the ground while unattended. When Marion’s care became too much for my mother to endure, she was sent to our neighbourhood workhouse, which had been imprisoning the indigent since the days of Charles Dickens.

The workhouse where Marion died was a large, brick building less than a mile from our living quarters. Since it had been designed as a prison for the poor, it had few windows and had a high wall surrounding it. When my sister left our house and was transported there on a cart pulled by an old horse, my mum and dad told my other sister and me to wave goodbye, because Marion was going to a better place than here.

The workhouse was not used only as a prison for those who had been ruined by poverty; it also had a primitive infirmary attached to it, where the poor could receive limited medical attention. Perhaps the only compassion the place allowed my parents was permission to visit their daughter to calm her fears of death.

My sister died behind the thick, limestone walls at the age of ten, and perhaps the only compassion the place allowed my parents was permission to visit their daughter to calm her fears of death. As we didn’t have the money to give her a proper burial, Marion was thrown into a communal grave for those too poor to matter. Since then, the pauper’s pit has been replaced by a dual carriageway.

Some historians have called the decade of my birth “the Roaring Twenties” but for most it was a long death rattle. Wages were low, rents were high and there was little or no job protection as a result of a postwar recession that had gutted Britain’s industrial heartland. When the Great Depression struck Britain in the 1930s, it turned our cities and towns into a charnel house for the working class, because they had no economic reserves left to withstand prolonged joblessness and the ruling class believed that benefits led to fecklessness.

Even now, when I look back to those gaslight days of my boyhood and youth, all I can recollect is hunger, filth, fear and death. My mother called those terrible years for our family, our friends and our nation a time when “hard rain ate cold Yorkshire stone for its tea”.

I will never forget seeing as a teenager the faces of former soldiers who had been broken physically and mentally during the Great War and were living rough in the back alleys of Bradford. Their faces were haunted not by the brutality of the war but by the savagery of the peace. Nor will I forget as long as I shall live the screams that fell out of dosshouse windows from the dying and mentally ill, who were denied medicine and solace because they didn’t have the money to pay for medical services.

Like today, those tragedies were perpetuated by a coalition government preaching that the only cure for our economic troubles was a harsh austerity, which promised to right Britain’s finances through the sacrifice of its lowest-paid workers. When my dad got injured, the dole he received was ten shillings a week. My family, like millions of others, were reduced to beggary. In the 1930s, the government believed that private charities were more suitable for providing alms for those who had been ruined in the Great Depression.

Austerity in the 1930s was like a pogrom against Britain’s working class. It blighted so many lives through preventable ailments caused by malnutrition, as well as thwarting ordinary people’s aspirations for a decent life by denying them housing, full- time employment or a proper education.

As Britain’s and my family’s economic situation worsened in the 1930s, we upped sticks from Barnsley to Bradford in the hope that my father might find work. But there were too many adults out of work and jobs were scarce, so he never found full-time employment again. We lived in dosshouses. They were cheap, sad places filled with people broken financially and emotionally. Since we had no food, my mum had me indentured to a seedy off-licence located near our rooming house. At the age of seven, I became a barrow boy and delivered bottles of beer to the down-and-outs who populated our neighbourhood.

My family were nomads. We flitted from one dosshouse to the next, trying to keep ahead of the rent collector. We moved around the slums of Bradford and when we had outstayed our welcome there, we moved on to Sowerby Bridge, before ending up in Halifax. As I grew up, my schooling suffered; I had to work to keep my sister, my mum and half-brothers fed. At the age of ten, I was helping to deliver coal and by my teens, I started work as a grocer’s assistant. At 17, I had been promoted to store manager. However, at the age of 18, the Second World War intervened in whatever else I had planned for the rest of my life. I volunteered to join the RAF.

My politics was forged in the slums of Yorkshire but it was in the summer of 1945, at the age of 22, that I finally felt able to exorcise the misery of my early days. In that long ago July, I was a member of the RAF stationed in Hamburg; a city left ruined and derelict by war. I had been a member of the air force since 1941 but my war had been good, because I had walked away from it without needing so much as a plaster for a shaving nick. At its end, my unit had been seconded to be part of the occupational forces charged with rebuilding a German society gutted by Hitler and our bombs.

It was in the palm of that ravaged city that I voted in Britain’s first general election since the war began. As I stood to cast my ballot in the heat of that summer, I joked with my mates, smoked Player’s cigarettes and stopped to look out towards a shattered German skyline. I realised then that this election was momentous because it meant that a common person, like me, had a chance of changing his future.

So it seemed only natural and right that I voted for a political party that saw health care, housing and education as basic human rights for all of its citizens and not just the well-to-do. When I marked my X on the ballot paper, I voted for all those who had died, like my sister, in the workhouse; for men like my father who had been broken beyond repair by the Great Depression; and for women like my mum who had been tortured by grief over a child lost through unjust poverty. And I voted for myself and my right to a fair and decent life.

I voted for Labour and the creation of the welfare state and the NHS, free for all its users. And now, nearly 70 years later, I fear for the future of my grandchildren’s generation, because Britain’s social welfare state is being dismantled brick by brick.

My life didn’t really begin until the end of the Second World War. I fell in love with Friede, a German woman, whom I married and brought home to Halifax. My wife gave me emotional stability while the welfare state gave me economic stability. When I was demobbed, I didn’t have many prospects, except using my brawn over my brain. I took factory jobs while my wife and I studied at night school. But I am forever grateful for the foundation of the NHS, because it allowed my wife to receive first-rate treatment for the PTSD she acquired by having witnessed both the atrocities of the Nazis and the firebombing of Hamburg, which killed 50,000 people in three nights of intense RAF bombing in 1943.

My experiences of growing up in Britain before the NHS, when one’s health was determined by one’s wealth, and after 1948, when free health care was seen as a cornerstone for a healthy economy and democracy, convinced me that it was my duty to share my family experiences at this year’s Labour party conference. I agreed to speak about the NHS because I know there are few people left who can remember that brutal time before the welfare state, when life for many was short and cruel. I felt that I owed it to my sister Marion, whose life was cut short by extreme poverty and poor health care, along with all of those other victims of a society that protected the rich and condemned the poor to miserable lives. In many ways, making that speech freed me from the suffering of my youth.

Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a second world war RAF veteran and, at 94, an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He has written 3 books of memoirs and two books of political memoir. His most famous book is the highly acclaimed Harry’s Last Stand and his next book due out in 2017 is Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future.

Source: The Mirror

The formation of the NHS was the greatest battle ever won by the common people of this country because it liberated us from the scourge of sickness.

I even needed my right lung drained of fluids. This brush with sickness reminded me that because I am very old, death is stalking me as a hunter tracks a wounded animal. But I know were it not for the NHS my life would have ended a long time ago because I come from an endless ancestry of hard-working folk whose labour never paid enough to afford a pleasant life.

The working class only came to good fortune when a Labour government was elected in 1945. Clem Attlee’s government dragged the country into the future by erecting a welfare state built upon the principle of universal healthcare, delivered through the NHS.

I recognised in 1948, when it was established, that it was a revolutionary concept because before then a trip to the doctor wasn’t based upon your needs but what was in your wallet.

When I fell ill with bronchitis a month after the NHS was born, I was gobsmacked that I’d been treated and issued antibiotics without having to wonder how I’d pay for it on my labourer’s wage. It’s why I’ve been frantic to impart to the younger generations that the consequences of not defending their right to an NHS that is funded by the State are dire.

If you are indifferent to the erosion of NHS services, the loss of trained staff due to Brexit or the demoralisation of staff due to austerity and inadequate wages, you are surrendering my generation’s greatest accomplishment – the creation of universal public healthcare. It will return Britain to the dog-eat-dog world of my youth, where I was traumatised by screams from poor people dying of cancer who couldn’t afford morphine to ease the agony of their end.

To this day, I recall with horror the parade of people I encountered during the Great Depression who died without proper medical attention because they didn’t come from the right class.

In the doss houses my family fled to when my dad lost his job in the mines, I met people with all types of untreated illnesses. Each suffered debilitating pain and stoically took their ang­uish as part and parcel of their existence. I remember how pathetic­ally my own grandad died in 1936 in the grim, tiny parlour of his rented two-up one-down, in great discomfort, being loved but inadequately cared for by my gran.

In those days we were at the mercy of our poverty. As a bairn I was sickly from malnutrition and suffered continuous bouts of diarrhoea that caused a prolapse. As there was no NHS or money for a doctor, all my mum could do was push it back inside.

From the moment I could walk, I knew a pauper’s pit awaited anyone too weak to withstand the ailments of childhood, as it’s where my eldest sister Marion ended up after she succumbed to spinal tuberculosis aged nine in 1926. As a boy I was witness to her slow, agonising death in our tenement squat.

What I remember most is the anguish my parents endured as they just didn’t have the dosh to afford medical specialists, sanitariums or proper diets that could have helped keep my sister’s TB as a chronic, rather than fatal, condition.

Marion died from the disease of systemic poverty and the indifference of the wealthy to those who lived below them. The pavements were crowded with malnourished children riddled with rickets, boils, lice and incessant hunger.

I was one of those and I was petrified by the knowledge that if I got hurt or sick, my survival depended on luck. However, over time and through the bloodshed of the Second World War, my generation ­finally demanded that all people of Britain deserved healthcare.

The NHS is your birthright, earned through the inhuman suffering that your grandparents and great-grandparents endured during the Great Depression.

If you do not stand up and resist its destruction by this Tory government, your fate will be as unkind as the one I saw meted out to anyone working class who got sick in the 1920s and 1930s.

I am one of the last people in Britain who can remember our country during an era when getting ill was a passport to extreme poverty, homelessness or premature death. Britain is suffering another winter of discontent in the NHS because of austerity, the threat of Brexit and the monetisation of medicine by giant oligopolies like Virgin healthcare.

A hard flu season means A&E departments look like triage wards just behind combat lines in war. Hospital hallways are stuffed with patients waiting for care or rooms while languishing on trolleys. Under Jeremy Hunt , the NHS has been stripped and starved of resources – and hope – when it should be protected and honoured.

In July it will be 70 and its creation should be treated with the same reverence as Nelson for victory at Trafalgar. You see, the formation of the NHS was the greatest battle ever won by the common people of this country because it liberated us from the scourge of sickness and the poverty.

As I am almost 100 years old, I am one of the last living bridges to your history. It’s why you must stand up and defend the NHS against the machinations of big business and the Tories who want to make my past your future.

• Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future by Harry Leslie Smith is published by Little Brown.

If we could solve the refugee crisis in 1945, I know we can do it again as long as we all pull together.

It’s why I am gratified by the help I’ve received so far in my quest to travel to Europe and the world’s refugee hot spots to shed real light on this preventable tragedy.

When I was in the Calais Jungle, in 2015, I remember thinking not far from this modern hell of desperation were the beaches of Dieppe where in my youth young men, British soldiers, waited to be rescued from the approaching Nazi army. I looked around at ramshackle Calais Jungle and reflected no flotilla boats will come to rescue these people also trapped by politics and belligerent forces.

On that journey into the Calais Jungle, I met a young lad who was no more than 24. I thought when I first encountered him that his face looked as young as a teenagers except for his eyes that looked older than my own eyes that had been looking at the world, since 1923.

I quickly found out that the weariness of life displayed in those eyes was justified. In good English, he told me that his village in Sudan had been burned down, by government forces and that some family members and friends of his had also been killed by them . He was a polite man and after showing me the squalid tent he lived in and taking me for a tour of the shambles that he now called home; he bid me good bye.

As I was about to move on and meet some other refugees, he called out to ask me in angry puzzlement, “why doesn’t anyone care if I live or die?” I was silent for awhile because I remembered that when I was young and struggling in the Great Depression, I felt the same way and I knew he was right-nobody gave a tinker’s damn for him or his kind.

It’s why I had no real answer for him but I touched his shoulder and said I cared whether he lived or died. But I knew as did he that wasn’t enough because I was just an old man. I needed to make others feel like me about him and the 60 million refugees that languish in camps around the world in subhuman living conditions.

It was right then and there, I resolved that I would do my utmost to speak out against this refugee crisis and hope that my voice in the wilderness would be heard by others. I think we have a fighting chance of turning the tide on the refugee crisis, if enough of us do our part, like we did in the Second World War to stop evil in its tracks.

If we could solve the refugee crisis in 1945, I know we can do it again as long as we all pull together.

You can donate to Harry’s Last Stand Refugee Tour here…

Harry Leslie Smith is a 94 year old survivor of the Great Depression, a 2nd Word War RAF veteran and an activist for social justice. He is the author of 5 books.

Source: The Independent

I want my memories to be a testament of what must not happen again, especially when it comes to the treatment of those who flee their countries because of war or persecution.

I cannot sit back in good conscience while the world my generation built is left to turn feral in the hands of right-wing populists and indifferent capitalists. Too many people died and too many lives were cut short or mangled by the Great Depression and the Second World War for me to accept that the architecture of fascism being built by Donald Trump along with demagogues in Europe and Asia should be allowed to go unchallenged.

I am a very old man whose only weapon is that I have endured the catastrophic history of the 20th century and I am not afraid to tell younger generations what I saw and experienced in my youth. I want my memories to be a testament of what must not happen again, especially when it comes to the treatment of those who flee their countries because of war or persecution.

So even though I am close to 100 years old, I travelled two days ago to Ottawa because I think Canada has shown leadership when it comes to the current refugee crisis. I came to meet with Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary Gerald Butts because I wanted to explain why, at the age of 95, I am making the refugee crisis my last stand.

In this meeting I was asked how my journey towards refugee advocacy started. For me, it began near dusk on a day near the end of April 1945 when my RAF unit made camp close to the Dutch-German border.

In the distance, artillery rumbled, sounding to my ear like thunder did when it struck the moors, miles from my mother’s one-up-one-down house in an ugly part of Halifax. The fragrance of spring flowers coming into bloom jarred against the remnants of war that surrounded me, from burnt-out German vehicles to the bloated corpses of horses that lay at the side of the roadway.

All of Europe ached from the pain of battle, hunger, injury, loss, and death. We were a generation bleeding out from the madness of fascism that had butchered a continent. Humanity, however, hadn’t deserted my generation even if the war had stolen our innocence.

That’s why, on that night, when scores of refugee children came to our perimeter fence enticed by the smell of stew that cooked on our camp stoves, we didn’t turn our backs on those children, like so many well-fed people do today in Europe and America. No, we fed them, played with them and gave them a safe place to kip until the Red Cross arrived and took them to safety.

I look back and think how different life was because all we wanted was the right to grow old in dignity under the umbrella of a welfare state. Think about it: out of the ashes of the Second World War, the United Nations was conceived and the declaration for human rights written, enacted and for decades held as sacred and inviolable. Whereas from the funeral pyre of the Iraq War was born the furies of Isis and total destabilisation in the Middle East.

In this era we live in grotesque inequality and ignorance. Populism and fascism ride about the world stage like a victorious sports team in a city parade. The United States under Donald Trump cages refugee children, pulls out of the UN Council and uses dehumanising terms about other races; doing so has, from Nazi Germany to Rwanda, always been a harbinger of genocide.

In Italy, a new government coalition comprising a right-wing faction which would make Mussolini proud bars the refugee rescue ships that trawl the Mediterranean Sea searching the waters for desperate souls who left Africa in boats that wouldn’t be safe to punt down the river in Maidenhead. These men, women and children make this crossing because staying in their home countries means certain death, perpetual rape or devastation from economies that only benefit the wealthy.

Even worse, the interior minister in Italy is drawing up lists like Nazis of old against the Roma to deport them from their nation’s borders, making them eternal refugees.

Most disturbing to me are the people I encounter every day who have food in their bellies, a job to go to and holidays to eagerly await, and yet they judge refugees who have endured horrible privations as corrupt swindlers. They in their selfish, racist myopia become a tide of malevolence that drowns the aspirations of too many people who have on an individual level suffered the same horrors as people in the death camps of the Nazis or the gulags of Stalin.

Right now, there are 64 million people the world over who are displaced. They are either living in squalid camps or fleeing for their lives over dangerous terrain, looking for sanctuary in western countries who are ignoring the warning signs of this crisis with same tenacity as the ancient people of Pompeii ignored the rumblings of Vesuvius.

It’s why at 95, I cannot be silent any longer about this growing threat to humanity’s survival. I am spending the little time I have left to live on earth travelling the world to visit refugee camps, government leaders and ordinary people to try to end this madness.

There is a good chance because of my age that I will die on my travels, but I am not worried about my end. I am more worried about the end of a world that believes that all human beings have a right to peace and prosperity, not just the entitled few.

We cannot let the candle of civilisation be blown out by the likes of Donald Trump, which is why, to resist him, you must in your way help end the refugee crisis. So I ask you to flood your government representatives with letters, emails and tweets in support of refugees – because it is only the slender thread of fate that separates our destiny from theirs.

Harry Leslie Smith is the author of ‘Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future’, published by Little Brown

In an extract from his new book, Harry’s Last Stand, Harry Leslie Smith describes his despair at the UK government’s dismantling of the welfare state.

Considering the hunger, the turmoil and the squalor in Britain during the early years of the 20th century, it was miraculous that I lived to see my third birthday. That I survived colic, flu, infection, scrapes and bangs without the benefits of modern sanitation, hygiene or health care, I must give thanks to my sturdy peasant genes. As a baby, I was ignorant of the great sorrow that enveloped England and Europe like a damp, grey fog. The nation was still in mourning for her dead from the world’s first Great War. It had ended only five short years before my arrival. Nearly a million British soldiers had been killed in that conflict. It had begun in farce in 1914 and ended in bloody tragedy in 1918. In four years, that war killed more than 37 million men, women and children around the world.

Even when the guns across the battlefields were made dumb by peace, the killing didn’t stop. Death refused to take a holiday and a pestilence stormed across the globe. It was called the Spanish flu. The pandemic lasted until 1921 and erased 100 million people from the ledger book of the living.

Like most people in Barnsley, my family occupied a terraced house. They were built back-to-back and in a row of 10 units. There was little space, privacy or comfort for us or any of the other occupants. It was just a place to rest your head after spending 10 hours hacking coal from the side of a rock face hundreds of feet below ground. Three walls out of four were connected to another household.

Slum house in 1935

The floors were made of hard slate rock and were sparsely covered with old rags that had been hand-woven into coarse mats. The interior walls were comprised of wet limestone coated in a gruel-thin whitewash that never seemed to look clean.

In summer our home was hot, in autumn damp, and in winter bitterly cold, while spring was as wet as autumn again. The house had no electricity and only the parlour and scullery possessed a gaslight fixture. After sunset, it sputtered and hissed a gloomy yellow light that illuminated our poverty. I shared a room with my older sister, Alberta. We slept together on a straw mattress that was host to many insects and reeked of time and other people’s piss. Its covering was made from a rough material that was as uncomfortable to me as the occasions when my father tickled my face with his moustache. Depending on the season, I slept in my undershirt or remained fully clothed. During the cold months, Alberta and I nestled together and shared our body heat to stave off the chilling frost beating against the windowpane. Our parlour had no furniture except a stool and an upright piano that had come as part of my dad’s legacy from his father. But it stood mute against the wall because the room was occupied by my infirm and dying eldest sister, Marion.

At the age of four she had contracted tuberculosis, which was a common disease among our class. Her ailment was caused because my parents were compelled to live in a disease-ridden mining slum at the end of the Great War. Eventually my parents were able to leave the slum but by then the damage had already been done to my sister’s health, and the TB spread into her spine. It left her a paraplegic with a hunchback. For the last 12 months of her life, Marion was totally dependent on my mother to be fed, bathed and clothed. In those days, there was no national health service; you either had the dosh to pay for your medicine or you did without. Your only hope for some medical care was the council poorhouse that accepted indigent patients.

As a young lad, I was encouraged by my parents to spend time with my ailing sister. I think it was because they knew that she was dying and they wanted me to remember her for the rest of my life. I didn’t comprehend illness or death because I was only three, so I contented myself with playing near her sick bed. On some occasions, I told her nonsense stories, but my sister couldn’t respond to my kindness because the disease had destroyed her vocal cords.

Even though she was in extreme pain while the TB ate away at her spine and invaded her vital organs, she was silent. My sister always seemed to be looking past me with her large expressive eyes. Perhaps she was waiting for death, or perhaps she found the gaslight casting shadows on the opposite wall an appealing distraction from the monotony of the pain that consumed her 10-year-old body.

TB was known in the 19th century as the poet’s disease, but I saw no lyricism in the way it killed Marion. As the autumn days grew shorter in 1926, so did the time my sister had to live. Her last weeks were unbearable but she still fought death. She thrashed her arms about in defiance against the coming end to her life. My parents tried to calm her by stroking her hair or singing to her, but she wasn’t pacified. Instead, Marion wept silent tears and continued to struggle with so much ferocity that in the end my dad reluctantly restrained her to her bed with a rope.

My parents decided that there was nothing more that could be done for Marion in their care, so they arranged for her to be placed in our local workhouse infirmary. It was the last stop for many people who were too poor to pay for a doctor or proper hospital care. The workhouse in our community was a forbidding building that had been constructed during the age of Dickens. In the century before I was born it was used to imprison debtors, house orphans and provide primitive health care to the indigent. By the time Marion was sent there, it was no longer used as a prison. However, orphans, the sick and those with communicable diseases were still incarcerated behind its thick, towering black walls.

Soup kitchen 1935

On one of the last days in September my mother pawned her best dress and my father’s Sunday suit and hired a man with an old dray horse and cart to come to our house and collect Marion. When he arrived, my dad carried Marion outside and carefully placed her into the delivery carriage where my mother was waiting for her.

Alberta and I stood on the side of the street and waved goodbye to Marion. I asked my dad where my sister was going and he mournfully replied: “She’s going to a better place than here.” Afterwards, he put his arms around me and Alberta and we watched the horse-drawn carriage slowly plod down our road towards the workhouse infirmary.

That was the last time I saw my sister alive.

Marion died a month later in the arms of my mother. There was no wake, no funeral service and even much later there was no headstone erected to mark her brief passage in life. My family, like the rest of our community, was just too poor to afford the accoutrements of mourning. We relied on my dad’s minuscule salary just to keep us with a roof over our heads and dry in the perpetual hard luck rain of Yorkshire. Even my dead sister’s landau was quickly dispatched to the pawnbroker’s shop where it was swapped for a few coins to help feed her hungry living siblings.

My sister’s body was committed to a pauper’s pit and interred in an unmarked grave along with a dozen other forgotten victims of penury. My parents didn’t even have a picture to remember their daughter’s life. To the outside world, it was as if she was never there, but for our family her life and her end profoundly affected us. My father never mentioned Marion’s name again. It wasn’t out of callousness or disrespect, but because her death festered in his soul like a wound that never healed. For the rest of his life my dad carried with him an unwarranted guilt that he was responsible for Marion’s tuberculosis, and it cut him deep. As for my mother, she often talked about Marion. As my family stumbled from misery to calamity, through the pitch dark of the Great Depression, my mother invoked my dead sister’s name as a warning that the workhouse awaited each of us, unless the world and our circumstances changed.

It would be almost 20 years before, in 1948, the NHS was formed, and for the first time in my civilian life I went to a doctor’s surgery and was treated for bronchitis with antibiotics that assured me a speedy and safe recovery. The cost to me was nothing, and I was grateful because I was skint, having just started back in the civilian working world.

As I convalesced, I was gobsmacked at the great consequences of free health care and the potential it offered to improve our society. It was a transformational shift in how we as a country viewed our fellow citizens. The creation of the NHS made us understand that we were in truth our brother’s keeper, and that taxation benefits everyone through maintaining not just our roads and sewers but the health of our children, workers and elderly.

To me, the introduction of free health care was the first brick laid on the road to the social welfare state. So it has always been difficult for me to listen to politicians, proud possessors of health insurance and shares in private health care companies, when they talk about how the health service that we fought so hard to build must change. The coalition government’s Health and Social Care Act will create a two-tier health care system. This act will see the NHS stripped down like a derelict house is by criminals for copper wiring.

Ukip has even proposed that A&E patients should have the right to buy their way to the front of the queue, while in Merseyside a private for-profit cancer clinic has set up shop under the NHS umbrella. Where will all of this end? What will be given the greatest priority in a new health care system that sends every service, from blood work to chemotherapy, out to the lowest bid tender?

It ends where I began my life – in a Britain that believed health care depended on your social status. So if you were rich and insured you received timely medical treatment, while the rest of the country got the drippings. One-fifth of the lords who voted in the controversial act – which provides a gateway to privatise our health care system – were found to have connections to private health care companies. If that doesn’t make you angry, nothing will.

Sometimes I try to think how I might explain to Marion how we built these beautiful structures in our society – which protected the poor, which kept them safe at work, healthy in their lives, supported them when they were down on their luck – only to watch them be destroyed within a few short generations. But I cannot find the words.

Harry’s Last Stand by Harry Leslie Smith is published by Icon Books.

Stand up and resist the destruction of the NHS by this Tory government, or your fate will be as unkind as the one meted out to anyone working class who got sick in the 1920s and 1930s.

Source: The Mirror

But I know were it not for the NHS my life would have ended a long time ago because I come from an endless ancestry of hard-working folk whose labour never paid enough to afford a pleasant life. The working class only came to good fortune when a Labour government was elected in 1945.

Clem Attlee’s government dragged the country into the future by erecting a welfare state built upon the principle of universal healthcare, delivered through the NHS.

I recognised in 1948, when it was established, that it was a revolutionary concept because before then a trip to the doctor wasn’t based upon your needs but what was in your wallet. When I fell ill with bronchitis a month after the NHS was born, I was gobsmacked that I’d been treated and issued antibiotics without having to wonder how I’d pay for it on my labourer’s wage.

It’s why I’ve been frantic to impart to the younger generations that the consequences of not defending their right to an NHS that is funded by the State are dire.

If you are indifferent to the erosion of NHS services, the loss of trained staff due to Brexit or the demoralisation of staff due to austerity and inadequate wages, you are surrendering my generation’s greatest accomplishment – the creation of universal public healthcare.

It will return Britain to the dog-eat-dog world of my youth, where I was traumatised by screams from poor people dying of cancer who couldn’t afford morphine to ease the agony of their end.

To this day, I recall with horror the parade of people I encountered during the Great Depression who died without proper medical attention because they didn’t come from the right class.

In the doss houses my family fled to when my dad lost his job in the mines, I met people with all types of untreated illnesses. Each suffered debilitating pain and stoically took their ang­uish as part and parcel of their existence.

I remember how pathetic­ally my own grandad died in 1936 in the grim, tiny parlour of his rented two-up one-down, in great discomfort, being loved but inadequately cared for by my gran.

In those days we were at the mercy of our poverty. As a bairn I was sickly from malnutrition and suffered continuous bouts of diarrhoea that caused a prolapse. As there was no NHS or money for a doctor, all my mum could do was push it back inside.

From the moment I could walk, I knew a pauper’s pit awaited anyone too weak to withstand the ailments of childhood, as it’s where my eldest sister Marion ended up after she succumbed to spinal tuberculosis aged nine in 1926. As a boy I was witness to her slow, agonising death in our tenement squat. What I remember most is the anguish my parents endured as they just didn’t have the dosh to afford medical specialists, sanitariums or proper diets that could have helped keep my sister’s TB as a chronic, rather than fatal, condition.

Marion died from the disease of systemic poverty and the indifference of the wealthy to those who lived below them. The pavements were crowded with malnourished children riddled with rickets, boils, lice and incessant hunger.

I was one of those and I was petrified by the knowledge that if I got hurt or sick, my survival depended on luck. However, over time and through the bloodshed of the Second World War, my generation ­finally demanded that all people of Britain deserved healthcare.

The NHS is your birthright, earned through the inhuman suffering that your grandparents and great-grandparents endured during the Great Depression. If you do not stand up and resist its destruction by this Tory government, your fate will be as unkind as the one I saw meted out to anyone working class who got sick in the 1920s and 1930s.

I am one of the last people in Britain who can remember our country during an era when getting ill was a passport to extreme poverty, homelessness or premature death. Britain is suffering another winter of discontent in the NHS because of austerity, the threat of Brexit and the monetisation of medicine by giant oligopolies like Virgin healthcare.

A hard flu season means A&E departments look like triage wards just behind combat lines in war. Hospital hallways are stuffed with patients waiting for care or rooms while languishing on trolleys.

Under Jeremy Hunt , the NHS has been stripped and starved of resources – and hope – when it should be protected and honoured. In July it will be 70 and its creation should be treated with the same reverence as Nelson for victory at Trafalgar.

You see, the formation of the NHS was the greatest battle ever won by the common people of this country because it liberated us from the scourge of sickness and the poverty.

As I am almost 100 years old, I am one of the last living bridges to your history. It’s why you must stand up and defend the NHS against the machinations of big business and the Tories who want to make my past your future.

• Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future by Harry Leslie Smith is published by Little Brown.

National Demonstration Saturday 30 June 2018

More details of the march and demonstration

Source: The Guardian

Because I am old, now 95, says Harry Leslie Smith, I recognise these omens of doom. Chilling signs are everywhere.

In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia eviscerates Yemen with the same ferocity as Mussolini did to Ethiopia when I was child in 1935. The hypocrisy of Britain’s government and elite class ensures that innocent blood still flows in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Theresa May’s government insists that peace can only be achieved through the proliferation of weapons of war in conflict zones. Venezuela teeters towards anarchy and foreign intervention while in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte – protected by his alliance with Britain and the US – murders the vulnerable for the crime of trying to escape their poverty through drug addiction.

Because I am old, now 95, I recognise these omens of doom. Chilling signs are everywhere, perhaps the biggest being that the US allows itself to be led by Donald Trump, a man deficient in honour, wisdom and just simple human kindness. It is as foolish for Americans to believe that their generals will save them from Trump as it was for liberal Germans to believe the military would protect the nation from Hitler’s excesses.

Britain also has nothing to be proud of. Since the Iraq war our country has been on a downward decline, as successive governments have eroded democracy and social justice, and savaged the welfare state with austerity, leading us into the cul de sac of Brexit. Like Trump, Brexit cannot be undone by liberal sanctimony – it can only be altered if the neoliberal economic model is smashed, as if it were a statue of a dictator, by a liberated people.

After years of Tory government, Britain is less equipped to change the course of history for the good than we were under Neville Chamberlain, when Nazism was appeased in the 1930s. In fact, no nation in Europe or North America has anything to crow about. Each is rife with inequality, massive corporate tax avoidance – which is just legitimised corruption – and a neoliberalism that has eroded societies.

Summer should be comforting but it isn’t this year. Looking at the young today, when I watch them in their leisure; I catch a fearful resemblance with the faces of the young from my generation in the summer of 1939. When I am out in town, I listen to their laughter, I watch them enjoying a pint or wooing one another, and I am afraid for them.

This August resembles too much that of 1939; the last summer of peace until 1945. Then aged 16 and still wet behind the ears, I’d go to pictures with my mates and we’d laugh at the newsreels of Hitler and other fascist monsters that lived beyond what we thought was our reach. Little did we know in that August 1939, life without peace, without carnage, without air raids, without the blitz, could be measured in days. I did not hear the thundering approach of war, but as an old man I hear it now for my grandchildren’s generation. I hope I am wrong. But I am petrified for them.

• Harry Leslie Smith’s latest book Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future is published by Constable & Robinson on 14 September

Source: Medium

The Tories are a wounded beast and this election set back can be mortal to them, if we apply the right the pressure.

Harry Leslie Smith is a 94 year old survivor of the 1930s Great Depression, a 2nd World War RAF veteran and a tireless activist for social justice. He is the author of 5 books.

Once, long ago, I traveled across the North Atlantic in a steam ship in the cold month of November. It was a frightful crossing of dark over cast skies and giant swells that pitched the vessel up and down as if it were a tiny skiff. Walls of harsh green water crashed against the windows in dining hall while below in my windowless cramped 3rd class cabin I felt like unsecured cargo on a tramp steamer in the throes of a hurricane as I kept being tossed from my bunk.

To me in 2017, Britain feels very much like that vessel steaming with uncertainty against hostile seas. Everything in our country because of austerity and now Brexit has come unstuck. We are a nation unhappily and unfairly divided by wealth and privilege. The cost of living has crept up and personal debt soars. No one knows where this all going to end. It’s truly a most disturbing time to be alive if you are not part of the 1%.

These past few weeks have been tempest of politics and a time of profound grief because Britain has been assailed by murderous terrorist attacks as well as the preventable tragedy that occurred at Grenfell Tower Block, in London

However, in the hazy light of the recent heat wave I saw the promise of hope return to our shores after an absence of 7 long years. This feeling of optimism for our future shimmered before me like an oasis for tired travelers on a caravan through the desolate sands of Arabia. You see something unexpected occurred on June 8th. That was the day when Britain went to the polls and the political pundits were proved wrong.

It was the day when many of us said enough is enough. It was the day when voter turnout increased and progressive forces rallied behind the banner of a Labour party transformed by Jeremy Corbyn into the party I remembered from 1945. It was the day that austerity and hard Brexit were put on notice by Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party.

This is no small matter because for once in the longest of time, the young were energised by politics, because they understood that their future is in jeopardy under a Tory government. It’s why they came out to vote in this election in numbers not seen for generations. The young came out like a phalanx for progress on June 8th and because they voted Labour the parties vote share increased to numbers not seen since Clem Attlee’s historical victory in 1945. Because the young and the disenfranchised came out to vote Theresa May’s government for the few was hobbled by the many. Now she holds on to power by her finger nails and must go cap in hand to the DUP if she wants to cling to power.

Imagine that before desolution the Tories had a 12 seat majority, a 20 point lead and every newspaper was ready to crown Theresa May the 21st century’s Margaret Thatcher. Eight weeks later, she is as weak and pathetic as Anthony Eden after the 1956 Suez Crisis. It just shows you what a fragile and inept politician Theresa May really is once you remove the varnish applied to her by the likes of the Daily Mail. She’s as strong and stable as a meringue. She’s like a paper Mache dragon that can intimate a child until a gust of wind blows it over.

However, we must not make the mistake of thinking we have won the war because that will take many more battles and much more commitment for you and me. Like Churchill said after routing Rommel in the desert in 1942. This is not the end but it is the end of the beginning.

But the price we have paid for austerity has been staggering and for some they have paid for it with their lives.

In due course we will find out the ultimate cause of the Grenfell Tower blaze, My fear is like Hillsborough it will come decades later when justice can’t be properly served. What we do know so far is almost a hundred people are dead because an ideologically driven austerity has caused the state to raise the draw bridge and lock the doors to civilisation for many of us.

Seeing Grenfell Tower forlorn and hollow of life, angers me beyond control. I’ve seen buildings like charred husks before, where fire has consumed innocent life with ravenous cruelty. But that was during time of war when the Blitz on London set many sections of our capital ablaze by enemy bombs falling from enemy aircraft.

The conflagration at Grenfell tower’s wasn’t caused by the clash of armies but because there seems to be a war being fought against the right for ordinary people to live a safe and healthy life. That’s just not right, it’s not the Britain we deserve, it’s not the Britain my generation wanted to build in 1945 when it lay in ruins from war and centuries of oppression by the entitled.

But change has come, I think had these tragedy occurred when the Tories had a working majority in parliament, it would have been even more difficult for survivors to seek remedy to their plight.

However, now the Tories are a wounded beast, bloodied, confused and frightened. This election set back can be mortal to them, if we apply the right the pressure.

Now that the Tories are weakened by a hung parliament and all their pettiness, ineptness hangs out like the shirt front of a wastrel, you have the power to hold their feet to the fire through peaceful protest, by joining a progressive political party, by engaging on social media and by making sure you’re ready to be counted in the next general election. Believe you me, Theresa May’s government won’t last until Christmas. But if you want to see the end of austerity and the brakes put on a hard Brexit, you must be sure to elect a Labour government with a majority, next time around. It’s the only thing that will truly give you a proper future and not the one I endured as a boy.

It’s age I suppose but I am always rummaging through my past remembering bits and pieces of it and assembling it like a jigsaw puzzle of despair. Recently, I remember my dad amusing me with the dickey bird rhyme after he’d been let go from his job in the pits because he injured himself at work. “There goes Peter, there goes Paul.” The night before we’d done a midnight flit and ended up in some fleabag of a doss house. But there was dad trying to keep our humanity by amusing his children while my mum sank into despair knowing there wasn’t even bred and drippings for our tea.

Even when he was unemployed and in ragged thread bare trousers, I always looked up to my dad until he was consumed by the Great Depression and disappeared from my life at the age of 8.

He was a small man like me but he had a strong back and strong muscles from years working as a hewer deep below the earth’s surface. Dad had a finely trimmed mustache that hid his missing teeth. He loved to play the piano and when he had the time read history encyclopedias. I must have been five when he ruptured himself in the pits and was put on top to move scrap until he ruptured himself again. Dad was sent home and if weren’t for his union we’d have been done in within the first week of his unemployment. But when he worked the pay was so appalling low that it was basically slave labour to fell the purses of the mine owners and the City.

When people disparage the unemployed and those on benefits they always talk about the dignity of Labour but they ignore the fact that there is no dignity in starvation wages because it’s just exploitation. Since the age of 7 I’ve been earning my crust of bread and I was lucky my health held out. But if I’d become sick or injured before the Welfare State, I’d have been like my dad, a vagrant of sorts. The only thing that makes life fair is the welfare state and that the rich should pay their measure of taxes. Those that argue against these principles are arguing against civilisation.

Source: The Mirror

During that election, held while the embers of the Second World War still smouldered, I was just 22. But events I had witnessed and endured in childhood as well as in uniform had aged my soul.

The war, along with the Great Depression, taught me and my generation the hard lesson that all of us – no matter our station in life – must defend their country against tyranny if civilisation is to be preserved.

Defence of civilisation comes in many guises but ultimately it comes by being a good and informed citizen who votes in elections.

Patriotism, or belief in country, didn’t come easy to me as a young man because I had grown up in extreme poverty in the destitute working-class neighbourhoods of Barnsley, Bradford and Halifax. Still in 1941, at the age of 18, I joined the RAF . Somehow, I survived the war, whereas a great many of my generation didn’t because their lives were extinguished in battles big and small all across the globe.

It’s why, when the war was over, I knew I had been blessed with good fortune and a responsibility to both those who had died and those who were yet to be born.

So, when a general election was called in 1945, I knew it was my duty to exercise my democratic franchise and vote, because so many of my generation had been killed fighting to preserve our rights as free citizens.

Besides, that election – very much like the one being fought today – offered real choice to me and my mates, who were young and just starting out in life. I knew, when I marked my ballot on that hot July day 72 years ago, I was voting for a Britain for the many and not just the few.

I voted for my future. I voted for fair wages, affordable housing, education and the right to public health care with the creation of the NHS , all of which was promised in the Labour manifesto.

Democracy only works if you are willing to exercise your rights as a citizen to vote. Not voting will always be an open goal for the entitled. You can’t stand on the sidelines when your way of life, your chance for a hopeful future, depends on the power of your individual vote.

Not voting isn’t a political statement, it’s political surrender. Don’t let someone else decide your fate. It is up to you to register to vote by May 22 and then on June 8 stand up, be counted and make your mark against those who want to steal your birthright, the NHS and the Welfare State.

I am in the winter of my days. So I can say with all honesty the times we live in now are as dangerous as those I knew in the 1930s and 40s. No one today can afford to be indifferent to democracy because tyranny comes in all shapes and sizes.

Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right

A tide of racism, nationalism, and authoritarianism is sweeping the world. With the world economy hobbled by debt and stagnation, society being torn apart by austerity and inequality, and a political system paralysed by corporate power, support for the Far Right is surging. This new book by Dr Neil Faulkner and Samir Dathi argues that we face the clear and present danger of ‘creeping fascism’.

Price £12 post free

Source: The Guardian

Harry Leslie Smith lived through the 30s and 80s and knows the only way to beat the tyranny of austerity is through defiance.

Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a second world war RAF veteran and, now 95, an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He has written 3 books of memoirs and two books of political memoir. His most famous book is the highly acclaimed Harry’s Last Stand and his latest book is Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future.

Nowadays, when wealth is considered wisdom, too often old age is derided, disrespected or feared, perhaps because it is the last stage in our human journey before death. But in this era of Trump and Brexit, ignoring the assets of knowledge that are acquired over a long life could be as lethal as disregarding a dead canary in a coal mine.

I have been living on borrowed time since my birth in Barnsley all those years ago: I survived both the depression and the second world war. Even in advanced old age, because I walked free of those two events, I feel like a man who beat all the odds in a high-stakes casino. It’s why I’ve embraced each season of my life with both joy and wonderment because I know our time on Earth is a brief interlude between nonexistence.

Still, many people persist in thinking that old age is the end of one’s usefulness or purpose, which could explain why the news that women in South Korea can expect to live into their 90s has been badly received. Some fear the indignity that old age may bring, or the dependence it may cause because of physical or mental impairment. On occasion I too worry that before death sets in on me that it may rob me of the elements that make me who I am. But ultimately, having experienced the profound indignity of extreme poverty during the 1930s and the sheer terror of war in the 1940s, I know that life must be battled until the bitter end.

Eternity is just around the corner for me but I don’t fear my death. I only regret that death will end my dance to the music of time, no matter how slow the waltz has become to allow me keep up. I know that my physical wellbeing and dignity may yet be affected adversely by the government’s self-created social care crisis but I will not spend either my last years or days living in fear of the Tories. I cannot because I have seen their kind before in the 1930s and 1980s and know that the only way we can beat the tyranny of austerity is through our own personal defiance.

People should not look at their approaching golden years with dread or apprehension but as perhaps one of the most significant stages in their development as a human being, even during these turbulent times. For me, old age has been a renaissance despite the tragedies of losing my beloved wife and son. It’s why the greatest error anyone can make is to assume that, because an elderly person is in a wheelchair or speaks with quiet deliberation, they have nothing important to contribute to society. It is equally important to not say to yourself if you are in the bloom of youth: “I’d rather be dead than live like that.” As long as there is sentience and an ability to be loved and show love, there is purpose to existence.

I learned a long ago time ago that there was wisdom and beauty that could be mined from the memories of those in the sunset of life. It is why as a boy I listened in rapt attention to my granddad as he lay dying from cancer and told me about his life both as soldier and miner during the reign of Queen Victoria.

All of you, when young, will make your own history: you will struggle, you will betray some and others will betray you. You will love and lose love. You will feel profound joy and deep sorrow and during all of this you will grow as an individual. That’s why it is your duty when you get old to tell the young about your odyssey across the vast ocean of your life. It is why when death does come for me – even if it mauls me with decrepitude before it takes me – I will not lament either my old age or my faded youth. They were just different times of the day when I stood in the sun and felt the warmth of life.