Harry Leslie Smith, 91 year old veteran of World War 2 and author of Harrys Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down, and What We Can Do to Save it, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about the state of austerity Britain. As a survivor of the Great Depression, he explains the extreme poverty he lived through growing up, and how his family struggled to find work. He feels that the UK is heading that way, with the government feeling austerity is the only way to restore a good standard of living when all it’s doing is creating more poor people. He warns that the richest don’t care about the poor. In the darkest periods, he couldn’t afford to see a doctor and it was only after the war that the NHS was introduced. He is appalled at the thought of privatisation of the NHS having experienced illness when you can’t afford a doctor. He feels a house is what makes a family, and for young people not to be able to get on the property ladder is dreadful, with building handed over to companies working for the government and the wealthy. He warns the government is run by industrialists, with parliamentarians as their puppets, and no is longer a government for the people by the people. It must be a democracy, and not people from the top echelon running it for their own ends. From the start, he thought Afghanistan was the biggest mistake made by the US or the UK, saying that Bush was more interested in oil than the Iraqi people. He says that whilst, if we hadn’t intervened in Iraq, the Iraqis would probably still be oppressed, at least they would be alive https://youtube/watch?v=YssVxTpAJDo&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 17:13:55 +0000
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