Not long before he died, I asked my dad, Harry Leslie Smith what he thought were his greatest achievements.
Naturally, he said that marrying my mum was his most profound and life altering accomplishment.
He then said that being a father who was able to love his children and provide a comfortable lifestyle for them while they were growing up was his proudest achievement.
However, what he believed was the 3rd most important achievement in his life surprised me.
I expected it to be surviving the Great Depression or the Second World War, but it wasn’t because that was just “bloody luck,” according to my dad.
Even his work with refugees or the books he’d written that chronicled his youth and our era were not as important as one action that he did as a young man.
To my dad, the third greatest achievement he’d accomplished in almost a hundred years of life was at the age of 22 voting for Labour in the 1945 General Election.
“By marking my ballot paper for a Labour candidate, in July 1945, I finally felt, I had control over my destiny.”
Yet, he said to me; it took a giant leap of faith to actually be arsed to go to a voting station and trust that politics could change his life for the better.
Like so many today, he just didn’t believe politicians when they said they were going to change Britain for ordinary voters.
His disbelief came naturally to him because he had endured extreme poverty in the 1930s that had reduced his family to rough doss house living and forced him to become a child labourer at the age of seven.
Still, he did go and vote because he felt he owed it to his older sister Marion who had died in a workhouse infirmary from TB because his dad on a miners wage couldn’t afford a doctor because Britain didn’t have public healthcare before 1948.
Helping Attlee’s Labour win that election by voting for them transformed my dad’s life because that government delivered on their election manifesto promises to end the scourge of poverty that prevented millions of citizens from leading full, productive and meaningful lives.
In those years after World War Two everyone, from the common worker to the wealthy stock broker shared in the pain to rebuild a Britain shattered by war because austerity then was about saving Britain and not like today, giving the rich a free ride by reducing their taxes.
Attlee’s Labour returned my dad’s faith in humanity as it did millions of his fellow citizens who had been sorely tested by the brutality of the war against Hitler and Imperial Japan.
Labour made the working class feel welcome in their own country by building the NHS and telling them you will never have to fear that sickness will leave you broke and homeless.
Over the decades my dad never lost that optimism that he gained when Labour won the General Election in 1945 because he understood that if Labour could transform Britain in his youth by emancipating the working class, through slum clearance, better working conditions, free education, affordable housing and public healthcare; it could do the same thing at the end of his years for the younger generations.
For the last ten years of my dad’s life, he devoted it to telling people all across Britain that his past didn’t have to be their future as long as they put their faith in the Labour’s pragmatic social democracy that acted as an economic and social tide to raise all boats.
This is the first election since 1945 that my dad won’t be in his own humble way stumping for Labour because he died a year ago, at the age of 95 on November 28th.
One of the greatest consolation for me during my dad’s final hours of life was a video I was able to play him sent by Owen Jones that had him and Labour supporters calling out his name and giving one final hip hip hurrah, for the sacrifices he’d made to build a better Britain for all.
He would strongly endorse Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s plan to make Britain, once again a country where all prosper not just the lucky few.
My dad epitomised an era that rebuilt this nation for the many and not few, after the war when it elected a Labour government.
His generation was the greatest because it wasn’t afraid to nationalise key industries like the railways to better serve ordinary people rather than the rich owners.
His generation wasn’t afraid to create an NHS, or eradicated poverty because they had known the indescribably hardships in the maelstrom of the Great Depression when there was no welfare state to protect us from the greed of the entitled.
My dad had so much faith in today’s Labour party because in it he saw a reflection of Attlee’s government when they took office and pledged to rebuild Britain from the ashes of war and inequality, for everyone.
For me, since my dad died it has been a hard, cold year of grief.
But I feel that my mourning must end and life must be lived. So during the last weeks of this general election I will to travel to the county of my father’s birth, Yorkshire, and remind voters about why they should vote Labour because in these troubled times it might be the greatest achievement for not only their lives but their children and grandchildren to come.
