This week a good man died after a long life lived well through helping others. His name was Harry Leslie Smith and for the fans he achieved late in life was built on the noble art of speaking truth to power.
He spoke with the honesty and simplicity of lived experience about the experience of growing up in grinding poverty and the fears of an old man that the mistakes of the past are about to be repeated.
This had always been a powerful message, particularly in a country where those who hold power believe that inequality validates their economic thinking.
I had the privilege of heating Harry speak only once, at a rally held in my home tot of Stoke-on-Trent during the 2015 election.
It was one of those dispiriting events that pepper a campaign. A grey spring afternoon spent listening to speakers rehash lines they've used a dozen of more times before.
The star turn that day was Tristram Hunt, at the time the MP for Stoke Central, his speech was an exercise in bored enticement. No phrase cliché went unused and the delivery made that of a broken speak your weight machine sound like Lawrence Olivier playing Henry V.
He was followed on the under card by two trades union officials, about whom the kindest thing to be said was that their oratory style was based on volume rather than content, or coherence.
Then came Harry Leslie Smith, a speaker of a different and, to this jaded listener anyway, much higher order. He didn't deploy the tricks of rhetoric or the dark areas of public relations training. He spoke quietly and simply from the heart about the horrors of growing up in the hungry years between the wars.
What he said mirrored the stories my late father used to tell about the whole family having to pawn their best clothes on Monday in the hope of being able to afford to get them out of hock in time for church on Sunday. All too often they and most of their neighbours couldn’t.
As someone who studies society at a university I get to see the data about inequality, poverty and destitution in this the fifth richest country in the world. Time and again I am shocked by the similarity between the Britain of 2018 and the one of the 1930’s recalled by Harry in his speech that day.
Politicians don’t talk about this nearly enough, when they do so they either stigmatise people who are struggling to survive, setting up a false conflict between ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers’. The truth, as Harry knew so well, is that to survive at the bottom of society you must strive harder than any minister or captain of industry.
The other stock response of a political class distant from the concerns of everyday Britons, is to talk about poverty and inequality as abstractions, hedging them around with statistics and theories. Their actions may be well meaning, but seldom reach out beyond the ivory towers of academia into the confusing world of reality.
Dylan Thomas didn’t, due to his dissipations, live to see old age, but he wrote powerfully about how it should ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. Not just in this instance against the dying of that of reason as an amnesiac generation stumble towards the precipice their elders nearly fell over into disaster.
In Harry Leslie Smith the rage of the old burnt with the focus and intensity to a welding torch. Now he is gone those of us who are younger should try to catch its embers and fan them into a flame of our own.
We should honour his passing as that of a man of honour who fought the good fight to the end. Then as his memorial take up the cudgels and wage it ourselves.
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