James Keir Hardie was central to the founding of the Labour Party. Born in 1856, the illegitimate son of a miner and a farm servant, he was brought up an atheist by a kindly stepfather (save when he was with drink when the boy was called a “bastard”.) He started work at eight and, by ten, was the family breadwinner with his stepfather unable to work following an industrial accident. Sacked by the local baker for lateness, when his younger brother was ill and his mother in the late stages of pregnancy, he was forced down the mines where he stayed until, in 1878, he became secretary of the Hamilton District Branch of the Lanarkshire Miners Union.
Class war had been declared – by the employers – and almost immediately the family was collectively punished for his trade union activities, with he and his two younger brothers first dismissed and then blacklisted. It was then that Keir Hardie became a Christian and a journalist. As a Christian he was close to the Evangelical Union, a breakaway sect of the Congregational Church that believed God loved all men and hated the “demon drink”, while as a journalist his copy was radical Liberal, attacking the consequences of Lib-Lab MPs such as Thomas Burt and Alexander McDonald being elected under the sufferance of the Liberal Party and, therefore, forced to toe their line – where labour was subservient to capital and government left well alone.
It was the consequences of this and the hypocrisy of church-going charity-giving wealthy Christians devoted to the Lord’s Day Observance Society but making their own workers slave seven days a week for a pittance that meant he became, in 1887, a socialist. His brand, despite an early acquaintance with Frederick Engels and Eleanor Marx, was in the moral not physical force tradition; not that he was against some healthy disruption.
But for Hardie it was the long march of the parliamentary road to socialism – unencumbered by clinging Liberals. He started to proselytise his message around Britain to workers and trade unionists. As a result, he was elected MP for West Ham in 1892 and, in 1893, helped with the trade unions to formally establish the Independent Labour Party and then, in 1900, the Labour Representation Committee, allowing affiliation by socialist societies, trade unions and labour churches.
The next election saw Hardie lose his seat as the ILP fared badly, but the crowing obituaries of the enemies of both the man and the party he represented were premature. At the 1906 election Labour won 29 out of the 50 seats it contested and Hardie was back as the member for Merthyr. And within 40 years Labour would form a majority government. Hardie himself died in 1915, harried and hounded by press and public for his fierce opposition to Britain’s latest imperialist war.
His anti-war stance was a reflection of both his religion and his politics. He was in favour of the nationalisation of major industries, the regulation of smaller ones, provision of social security in the form of sickness and injury benefit and the payment of old age pensions. A supporter of women’s rights and the militant Women’s Political and Social Union – he was rumoured to have had an affair
with Sylvia Pankhurst – better and equal treatment in the colonies, and animal welfare, he opposed deployment of the army by government on the side of the employers in industrial disputes as class war and was also a staunch republican, as early as 1893 trying to move a motion deploring the House’s congratulations on the Duke of York’s marriage.
All of which would not make him such an obvious recruit to what the party he founded has become, although he might have lived with that. But I suspect what would shock him most is the class nature of the leadership. Because, for him, “at heart the Labour Party was to be a working-class party”. Our greatest hero? I would answer Bob Holman’s question in the affirmative.
–
Keir Hardie: Labour’s Greatest Hero?
by Bob Holman
Lion, £10.99
