I meet Harry Leslie Smith in an empty Sheldonian Theatre, where later on he is to give a talk on austerity in conversation with journalist Owen Jones. While Jones is well known as an impressively fiery speaker, Leslie Smith is softly-spoken, unassuming, a little out of place in the grandeur of the Sheldonian. But when he does speak, his words – carefully chosen, passionate – are every bit as forceful and compelling as Jones’. Over the last couple of years, the 91-year-old war veteran and ex-carpet salesman from Barnsley has risen to prominence as the Left’s most unlikely saviour.
He has written impassioned articles about the shrinking of the welfare state, the rise of UKIP and on the appropriation of remembrance. He recently stated in a piece for the Guardian that in 2014 he would “wear the poppy for the last time” because “my despair is for those who live in this present world”.
He reduced MPs to tears with his speech to the Labour conference on the fight to save the NHS. There is something of the Biblical prophet about Leslie Smith, who is able to draw on experiences of deprivation that subsequent generations can only imagine, to stop us from hurtling towards our social demise. His activism and writing is always informed by the memory of his childhood, which he describes to me as “a time of unspeakable misery for the working classes, a time that I remember all too well”.
Now, with his new book Harry’s Last Stand, Leslie Smith calls on the general public to speak up about the issues they believe in. The war veteran embraces the power of social media, asking Twitter followers to imitate him with the snappy hashtag ‘#istandupfor’.
I ask Leslie Smith how he came to take up political writing at this time in his life. He gently corrects me, telling me that though he’s only recently drawn the notice of the public, he has spent his whole life writing. This certainly comes across in his articles, which often have a poetic and lyrical force. Perhaps his best known piece is entitled as an “eulogy” to the NHS. “With writing” he says, “it seems as though I started early on in life, actually. In the early 1940s, when I was in the Royal Air Force, I kept a diary meticulously, of daily events and people I met, that sort of thing. I also wrote poems and short stories, items which were picked up by little local newspapers. But until now, that’s as close as I got to publication.”
As a boy, Leslie Smith didn’t have much in the way of formal education, but after the war he was able to go back to school. “I didn’t get the chance to go to college or university. But in the fifties my wife and I both went to night school. I took writing and several other literary pursuits. And that was the beginning of my education.”
He tells me that a few years ago he nearly packed it all in for the well-earned ease of retirement. “I was in my eighties. I was in Portugal, looking at houses and thinking I might go and spend the rest of my life in the sun there.” What changed? What made Leslie Smith swap the Algarve for touring the country on damp winter’s nights like tonight? “It was the 2008 banking crisis. I was angry. I was furious. Because no one in power, no banker, no politician, ever paid the price for causing so much suffering. The British taxpayer had to foot the bill and bail out the banks. And I felt that I must do something. So I started researching everything I could find about our governments and our politicians. Everything leading up to various financial collapses.”
Leslie Smith is scathing about the Coalition’s program of privatization and cuts. The subject to which Leslie Smith returns again and again in his writing is the bleakness of a world without a welfare state, a world where his sister, aged ten, died of tuberculosis in a local workhouse infirmary. I ask what, if any, parallels he can see between that time and David Cameron’s vision for Britain in the 21st century.
“Cameron’s vision for Britain […] is cloaked in the language of progress, but I fear that Britain is regressing back to a time which I remember with pain and suffering. It’s just about time that Cameron and his ilk were kicked off their thrones. It’s distressing to see his disdain for two groups of people in our society: the young and the poor. The young people today are suffering more than anyone, I think. They have accumulated mountains of debt, they aren’t supported by the state, they’re forced to go into unsteady, low-paid jobs. And there’s a chance that they are going to be the lost generation, just as my generation were.”
Leslie Smith clearly passionately feels that the Conservatives must not win the general election in May. But are Labour the force to take them on? Do they offer a sufficient alternative? Harry is a life-long Labour voter. For him, Labour will always be the party that built the National Health Service and the welfare state, the party of Attlee and Bevan.
And yet, he is not uncritical of the party; in fact, he has been very explicit in his criticism of Blair and New Labour. We discuss the current surge in support for the Greens, but Harry is doubtful about how this will translate into electoral success.
A little resignedly, he tells me, “For me, unfortunately, Labour is the only viable alternative at this present time. I wish I could say I had three choices on the ballot paper — but I don’t. I’d like to see someone in the mainstream parties who shared my thoughts about what life should be like, about the duty of the state to provide a comfortable existence to everyone in Britain. But it seems, at the moment, that’s too much to ask for.”
Many people share Leslie Smith’s disappointment in the lack of political diversity among the mainstream parties. Our conversation turns to how this translates into apathy and disengagement; a vicious cycle, which allows the political elite to continue without challenge. I expect Leslie Smith to tell me that a vote for Labour is better than no vote at all, but his answer takes me by surprise.
“What many people don’t realize is that spoiled ballots are still counted — I’ve thoroughly investigated this. I’d like to see that all those people who don’t vote through apathy, because they don’t feel that they want to support any of the options on the ballot paper, they should go and spoil a ballot. Because spoiled ballots will be counted. And if enough spoiled ballots turn up then maybe the government would realize that they don’t have a monopoly on power, that the people are angry.”
Whether it takes the form of voting, or more subversive action which would call attention to widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream politics, Leslie Smith has clearly devoted his retirement years to agitating and inspiring people to be active, to participate however they see fit.
A rather serious interview ends on a more hopeful note. Leslie Smith’s real optimism is reserved not for party-politics, not for Labour’s chances in the next year’s elections, but for the potential of the generation which is just coming of age.
He talks highly of the people he’s met on his travels, “When I look around England, at all these young people at the universities, I feel that there must be hundreds and hundreds of brilliant, compassionate people who could run the country so bloody well!
“There’s a lot of energy, but they have yet to achieve the momentum they need. At times, it seems that real change is never up about the issues to come. But it will.”
