The WWII hero and socialist Harry Leslie Smith passed away one year ago today.

As the guns fell quiet in 1945 and the dust settled on the vanquished fascist empires, many Allied service personnel dove headlong into radical politics.

Eager to build a better world in place of the tyrannies they’d just brought down, veterans of the Second World War became major figures in the progressive struggles of the late 20th century.

Tony Benn, who’d served in the Royal Air Force, dominated the left wing of the UK Labour Party for two decades during the seventies and eighties.

Howard Zinn, an American WWII vet, soon became the best known radical academic in the postwar United States.

And Zygmunt Bauman, who’d fought the Nazis on the Eastern Front, established himself at Leeds University as one of the leading western critics of capitalism during the Cold War.

Veterans like these three shone bright in radical politics and activism in the decades after 1945.

But there was another WWII hero on the British Left who would come to prominence far later in his postwar life: Harry Leslie Smith.

Harry Leslie Smith spoke from experience and provided lessons for us all - click here to read more radical history!

A speech from the frontline  

Smith entered public politics at the age of 91 with a barnstorming speech urging the defence of the NHS against privatisation at the 2014 Labour Party Conference in Manchester.

I was lucky enough to be in the room at the time and it was without a doubt the most inspirational thing I’d ever heard.

Smith spoke of how Britain before the National Health Service was “barbarous, bleak, and uncivilised”.

Born into a working class family in Yorkshire in 1923, Harry knew this firsthand.

He'd grown up in grim poverty while his dad struggled to find work as a miner.

Such was the scarcity for British workers during Harry's childhood that he lost his older sister to tuberculosis when, in the absence of public healthcare, his parents couldn’t afford the necessary medicine to save her life.

Then came the war against the fascists. Harry enlisted in the RAF and served bravely until Hitler and his cronies were beat.

The next five years saw Labour make the most of the peace which Harry and his fellow veterans had won, by creating our National Health Service and welfare state, while establishing vital limits on the powers of capital.

Click to see our tea towel with Smith's words from the 2014 Labour conference

Harry's lasting defiance 

Fast-forward seventy years to our decade, however, and Harry Leslie Smith – now in his nineties – was growing concerned.

Smith saw signs that the dystopian world he’d been born into was coming back: with the Tories pushing privatisation of our public services – including the NHS – at home, and racism seemingly on the march around the world, as it had been amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

These worrying trends were still unchecked when Harry Leslie Smith died on 28 November 2018, exactly a year ago.

But Harry didn’t end his days in despair – far from it.

Nor did Smith leave it to others to do the work of radical politics.

Despite being well into his nineties, he was campaigning to the last – in solidarity with refugees and in support of the NHS, always with the fierce call to arms:

"Don't let my past be your future."

With vital elections looming on both sides of the Atlantic, there are few better ways to repay Harry’s service as both a pilot and a political activist than by choosing, as he always did, the politics of hope.

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