About This Recording
As 2025 comes to a close, despair overshadows hope for 2026. It has been a year of harsh economic and geopolitical cruelty. The ongoing cost-of-living crisis makes food, housing, and small joys unaffordable. This year, genocide was normalised, and fascism became mainstream politics in the West.
It’s doubtful that we can escape the cul-de-sac neoliberalism pushed us into without a bloody revolution. However, if there is a way forward, it will be achieved by honestly remembering our working-class history — without interpretation or reinvention by the entitled, who dictate the ebb and flow of even popular culture. We can use our past to revolutionise the future, so it can be for the many rather than the few.
On an audio tape, Harry Leslie Smith recalled Christmas in 1930, when he was seven years old and working-class Britain struggled through a harsh Great Depression hunger crisis. My dad’s words are redemptive and contemporary, considering how many bairns in 2025 will undergo a similar Christmas, thanks to a cost-of-living crisis created by the 1% to increase their wealth and power over us.
Harry Leslie Smith was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. He was born during an era when the working class lived in destitution, and the entitled classes lived lives of excess and narcissism. His life’s journey was a voyage most of his working-class generation undertook through the Badlands of poverty and war. But the sacrifices they made in their youth weren’t in vain — from those struggles, my father’s generation created the Welfare State.
Before Harry Leslie Smith died in November 2018, he dedicated the last decade of his life to warning ordinary society not to make his past their future. He wrote books, made speeches, and undertook exhaustive speaking tours in pursuit of this goal. His last project, The Green and Pleasant Land, was unfinished at the time of his death.
It’s a working-class Remembrance of Things Past, as well as a political testament about democracy’s need for a Welfare State.
For almost two years, I’ve been finishing The Green and Pleasant Land — the book my dad never had the chance to complete. It’s now finished and ready to find its audience. If you’d like a beta copy, just send me a DM.
A Note from Me
Like so many others, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking — made harder by cancer, lung disease, and the cost-of-living crisis. If you can, please consider a paid or gift subscription — just £3.50 a month or £30 a year (converted automatically to your currency). The price has stayed the same for all four years and will continue to do so.
There’s also a tip jar if that’s your preference.
Your support keeps me housed and helps preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith — a voice that still matters in this era of political and moral amnesia.
If you can’t contribute, that’s fine too. We’re all in the same boat. Please share this Sub stack so it reaches its widest possible audience.
Take care, and Happy Christmas, John
