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Post by alexandria on Jan 11, 2022 22:36:22 GMT 10
Health and Care Bill, Committee Stage, House of Lords, 11 January 2022...
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Post by Rareclan on Jan 12, 2022 3:58:37 GMT 10
The absolutely Wonderful Harry Leslie Smith giving a speech at Labour Party Conference 24/09/2014
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Post by alexandria on Jan 13, 2022 6:53:18 GMT 10
Excerpt : Harry’s Last Stand (Icon Books 2014) 'Today, after the newspaper and the newsreaders’ reports about cuts to the NHS, austerity measures for the welfare system, corruption in Afghanistan and bloodshed in Syria, the memories from my past become particularly strong. I feel as if I am still a little boy scrounging for sustenance in the Great Depression. Back then I was afraid, angry, hungry, humiliated by my family’s fall into the gutter. Thinking about it now makes my hands tremble and brings tears to my eyes. I am too old to be forced to remember this, too frail to plunge through the weeds and murky depths of my boyhood. It hurts too much, but then I stop and I grow enraged. I think to myself that my past should have just been that. It should have been a footnote in a story about a long-ago time, best forgotten. Stories about my past should end with: ‘Well, Granddad, that was in your day. Thank God we’ve got it all sorted now.’ ‘Cobblers,’ I mutter to myself. It’s all cobblers. Nothing has been sorted, nothing was fixed. I know this because UNICEF has just issued a report that states that by the year 2020 one in four British children will live in poverty. How is it possible, I wonder, that in 21st-century Britain, so many people can go without proper food, adequate shelter, medical care? The revelation stings because I know that those children who are born into poverty today are as unlucky as I was, born in 1923. They are destined to be crushed and defeated with the same ferocity as my generation was eight decades ago – unless we all put a stop to it. The weak and vulnerable today may have more creature comforts than my generation, it’s true, but we share the same emptiness, the same despair caused by politicians who promise that change is coming, like a mighty wind. But it is only bluster because nothing ever blows down towards the down-and-out in Britain or in America. When I watched footage of the riots in Britain in 2011, or of the Occupy protests around the world, I recognised that same urgency, that same anger that my parents’ generation felt. So many children, adults and even pensioners live on the kerbside of desperation. Yet the press, the government and too many ordinary people ignore it. They prefer to be like the citizens of Pompeii, and look away from the smoking volcano.'
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