#harryslaststand — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #harryslaststand, aggregated by home.social.
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Harry's Last Stand
Labour: Put Your Dinner Tray Up and Assume the Crash Position
JM Smith"Britain’s recent local elections tell a story less about the rise of the Green Party than about fascism becoming England’s factory default setting in the 21st century.
Neoliberalism does that to a people because its ideology diminishes the state in order to enrich its most privileged citizens." -
Harry's Last Stand
"The Lives My Mother Lived Before Me"
JM Smith"It’s Mother’s Day in Canada, the USA, Mexico, and Australia. My mother has been dead for twenty-seven years but I still buy flowers or a plant to remember.
When I recollect the moments of my mother’s existence, the sensation of sunlight and the crispness of approaching nightfall dance together. She knew how to love and live."
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Harry's Last Stand
The First Day of the Long Peace
May 8, 1945
JM Smith"The last week of war before the long peace was chaotic. The refugee encampment was off limits. However, I was part of a team that set up a food distribution tent near the shantytown of displaced Germans. We were told to look for SS soldiers and officers who might be hiding amongst the refugees. I never got sight of any."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #WorldWar2 #Peace
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Harry's Last Stand
A Bank Holiday in the Shadow of Collapse
JM Smith"Only the dregs are left of the Bank Holiday weekend. Summer is on the horizon, as is nemesis for the Labour Party in the local elections on the 7th. Let’s hope their drubbing signals the beginning of the end for neoliberalism. But I am not holding my breath. I long for summer, but I know it never feels the same—and won’t ever again."
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Harry's Last Stand
"May Day, 1945: My Mother’s Warning
JM SmithOn May 1, 1945, Hamburg, Germany, was the last major city held by the Nazis. My mother, along with other teenagers in Hamburg, was ordered to dig trenches. The city was to become a fortress against the advancing British army as it approached the gates. My mother knew the war was not only lost but almost over, as did most Germans."
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Harry's Last Stand
The Cost of Living: A Foreclosure on Sleep
JM Smith"Insomnia didn’t come at the end of this month as it has for the last two years, every other month. I don’t know why.
My finances are more precarious because of the increasing cost of living crisis. I know I am eating less. But I am not worried about that as long as what I consume is nutritious."#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #politics #capitalismIsADeathCult #fascism
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Harry's Last Stand
Don’t Get Killed Now: The Held Breath Between War and Peace
JM Smith"A friend called me this morning in a panic. Being a manual worker in your 50s without a pension is a terrifying prospect. A major illness hasn’t hit them yet,but it’s only a matter of time. Neoliberalism has left many workers like shipwreck survivors clinging to flotsam,treading water and hoping for rescue before hypothermia sets in."
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Harry's Last Stand
When Radiation and Neoliberalism Blew in the Wind
JM Smith"In April 1986, I was 22 and working in a factory, barely paying attention to a nuclear disaster unfolding half a world away. The Polish men I worked beside knew better. Forty years later, I’m still feeling the ripple of what I didn’t see.
In April 1986, I worked at a Philips factory for the summer. Philips didn’t pay me well—not much more than minimum wage." -
Harry's Last Stand
The Centre Built After 1945 Can No Longer Hold
JM Smith"My father’s last manuscript is done from beginning to end, but I am still not satisfied. So, I tinker with it and think how he would have wanted it presented.
However, I will finally submit Harry’s manuscript, The Green and Pleasant Land, to publishers in May. I’d like more time with it, but I need the money. So it has to be put out there."
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Harry's Last Stand
From Ramsay MacDonald to Keir Starmer: Labour’s Legacy of Betrayal
JM Smith"The month began in snow and ends in cold rain. My hands, thanks to beta blockers, are numb. Still, the hummingbirds will return soon. Online, I watched their migration from the US into Canada via Point Pelee. It will be another two weeks before they reach my part of the province. The seasons circle as you and I age."
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Harry's Last Stand
From the Coalface to the Pauper’s Pit
Working-class life and death before the NHS
JM Smith"The final clean-up of The Green and Pleasant Land manuscript has had many swings and roundabouts. It’s worth it,but emotionally exhausting. Harry Leslie Smith deserves one final say from beyond the grave, making the case not to make his past our future. However, we are probably beyond the point of no return when it comes to that."
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Harry's Last Stand
The Second Death of an Artist
Art, illness, and what we leave behind
JM Smith"Maria, who has now been my brother’s widow longer than his wife, turned 71 yesterday. Being a recluse, she doesn’t celebrate it, but she seemed to welcome my birthday text. Maria thanked me and responded, “I fear my life passed me by.”
Since childhood, chronic depression has been an unwelcome squatter in her consciousness."
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Harry's Last Stand
All Hat, No Cattle: The Neoliberal Left
JM SmithIt’s year 16 of the cost-of-living crisis. Many in the younger generations have never known a moment when they felt financially secure or able to look forward to a stable future.
Should we even be calling it a crisis when it has steadily worsened since 2009?
A crisis should have an ending. This one is a cul-de-sac. There is no exit without revolution
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Harry's Last Stand
Precarity: a euphemism for being fucked over.
The 1930s Are No Longer History but Prophecy
JM Smith"I’ve always thought the word “precarity,” used to describe modern hardships related to food and housing insecurity, was something a human resources office coined. Word-wise, it’s a lime that has been squeezed and pulped of emotive image."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #politics #fascism #poverty
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Harry's Last Stand
The Postwar Promise Died Gradually, Then Suddenly
Harry Leslie Smith’s Past Became Our Present
JM Smith"The relentless grind of neoliberalism in the dying days of Empire made me forget last week’s anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s death. Dead now for these 13 years. Sadly, what she helped unleash—a modern state shorn of a functioning and generous social safety net—didn’t die with her."
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Harry's Last Stand
The Britain We Came Home To
“Our man Attlee is taking back the mines and the steel works from the muckedy-mucks.”
JM Smith"In Life on the Never, Never, my dad wanted to explore working-class hopes and disappointments in postwar Britain. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he had lived in that kitchen sink dramedy."
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Harry's Last Stand
Keir Starmer: NHS Slayer
Harry Leslie Smith’s Past Became Our Present
JM SmithThings have been falling apart in Britain since the era of Margaret Thatcher. State infrastructure has been starved of public investment so that it becomes inefficient, incompetent, and inadequate for the needs of society. This is neoliberalism’s grand plan: to privatise every aspect of the state,from healthcare to education.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jmsmith/p/keir-starmer-nhs-slayer?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Harry's Last Stand
If We Did It Before, We Can Do It Again
The People’s Revolution for a Welfare State
JM Smith"These reminiscences from my father’s working-class life — a personal history of the people’s revolution to build a welfare state following WWII — are important. They show in 2026 that if it was done in the past, we can do it again. The Green and Pleasant Land is the story of one family’s personal struggle."
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Harry's Last Stand
Life on the Never, Never: Britain After the War
The People’s Revolution for a Welfare State
JM Smith"I feel I am racing against time—but don’t we all, feel this, in 2026? It’s hard not to think that neoliberalism is racing towards a catastrophic denouement that most of won’t survive. So, we rush on. For me, I hope to have finished editing my father’s final works before neoliberalism reaches its epilogue."
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Harry's Last Stand
Neoliberalism Severed Our Shared Human Condition
JM Smith"Introduction
Our timeline is twisted; nothing feels real except the desperate circumstances of daily life. Neoliberalism has divorced us from the shared human condition. It makes our times more tragic and irredeemable because organised solidarity among workers, the vulnerable, and the marginalised is scarce."
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Harry's Last Stand
Them or Us?
For Whom the Bell Tolls on Ultimatum Day
JM Smith"I hear it, and you hear that ticking sound—a clock on the mantelpiece, in the hallway, or on the church tower.
Tick tock, like a metronome keeping a pianist to exact time, until 8 PM, tonight.
Then, at the toll of eight bells, in the dusk of the Eastern Time Zone, according to Donald Trump—who has taken on the role of Yahweh—the Iranian civilisation ends."
https://open.substack.com/pub/jmsmith/p/them-or-us?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Harry's Last Stand
"Years of economic turmoil wore away our common courtesy."
JM Smith"It seems like forever now that I’ve been piecing together and editing my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land. The first volume is done, aside from some tinkering. This gives me a sense of enormous relief because I am always concerned that my health will pack right in before this job is done."
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Harry's Last Stand
How Many Aprils Do We Have Left?
In the Age of Trump’s Whimsy
JM Smith"Trump addresses his nation and the world tonight. This can’t be good and another is what it is scenario. Boots on the ground in Iran or a pullout of the USA from NATO are what the pundits are betting on. I have no clue what it will be, and probably nobody close to Trump does either, because the danger lies in the whimsy of his authoritarianism."
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Harry's Last Stand
The Right to Be Moved by Beauty in an Age of Brutality
JM Smith"Neoliberalism diverted humanity from the path towards freedom that was initiated by the Welfare State. Now we are hostages to a time of seemingly insurmountable cruelty. It’s unnerving to live through this, where ordinary citizens face economic collapse while the better-paid live out gilded age fantasies."
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Harry's Last Stand
Living in Fight or Flight
Poverty’s oldest symptom
JM Smith"The only way I can describe this tiredness over the last three months is the moment before anaesthesia takes hold, when your arms and legs feel weighed down. I think it’s a response to living in a constant state of fight or flight. It wears you down. Hopefully, it will pass. I’m finding it harder to tread water."
https://open.substack.com/pub/jmsmith/p/living-in-fight-or-flight?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Harry's Last Stand
The Way We Live Now
JM Smith"Capitalism has always dehumanised the vulnerable, the poor, and the disabled. For a while, we tamed the ideology of the oligarchs through a welfare state, reforms to taxation, and democratic institutions. That is history now, and what comes next is a further diminishment of ordinary struggles. We are rushing into the high beams of catastrophe."
https://open.substack.com/pub/jmsmith/p/the-way-we-live-now?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Harry's Last Stand
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Normal Was Built On Neoliberal Quicksand
JM Smith"The sun is out today, but March wears spring as if it were winter. It’s been too bleak for too long and grinds my bones. These last six years have gnawed at us like crows on a carcass.
On this day six years ago, there was intermittent rain. I watched it splatter against the window from my hospital bed."
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Harry's Last Stand
Imagine If "Socialist" Britain In 1948 Was Treated Like Cuba Is In 2026
JM Smith"This morning, while editing The Green and Pleasant Land, I found myself thinking about what-ifs. It occurred to me that if the world of 1945 had had an American president like Donald Trump, Britain’s Welfare State might never have been allowed to take shape."
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Harry's Last Stand
Without Moral Fibre
JM Smith"The times we live in would make a very good movie or novel to get stuck into on a rainy Sunday afternoon. But living through it is not so pleasant, at least for the likes of us. The line from King Lear comes to mind:"
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/jmsmith/p/without-moral-fibre-d45?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Harry's Last Stand
“Are You Having It or Not?”
In the Shadows of the Welfare State
JM Smith"On her first day in Britain, Friede encounters a country still shaped by war, scarcity, and the uneasy beginnings of something new, a social democratic Britain.
Before you is another chapter from The Green & Pleasant Land, which Harry Leslie Smith was working on at the time of his death."https://open.substack.com/pub/jmsmith/p/are-you-having-it-or-not?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
#HarrysLastStand #harryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #SocialDemocracy
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Harry's Last Stand
"I Got Out, Dad" Death Before The Welfare State.
"On this day in 1943, my grandfather, Albert Smith, died.
When he was twelve, he began working in a coal mine dug beneath the village of Barley Hole. He had a hard life. My father remembered him as a gentle soul with a keen curiosity for history, who could play the piano and loved his children."#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #politics #fascism #WelfareState #poverty