Keir
Hardie, 100 years on
Before the current Labour leader the last one with
a beard was Keir Hardie, who led the Party from 1906-8. He died 100 years ago
on September 26 1915. The centenary has been marked by at least one academic
conference pondering Hardie’s political impact and a Radio 4 programme by Gordon
Brown who is a Scottish labour historian by profession.
There is much scope for discussion and debate about
Hardie and hopefully the centenary will provide some all too rare reflections
on British labour history in the crucial period around the formation of the Labour Party in 1900. My thoughts here
touch, and only briefly, on a few enduring aspects of Hardie’s political
legacy.
Hardie’s original base, from the late 1870s, was amongst
first the Lanarkshire and then the Ayrshire miners in Scotland. He was a trade
unionist, a full time organiser, with a Lib-Lab (that is a trade unionist
within the Liberal Party) perspective on the world that focused strongly on
issues of respectability such as temperance and religious observance.
Hardie stood as an independent labour candidate election
in Lanark in April 1888 and in August of the same year he became the first
secretary of the new Scottish Labour Party. A career in Scottish politics surely
beckoned. Except that it didn’t because that wasn’t quite how Hardie saw the
world.
In 1892 he travelled to the East End of London, another
centre of a newly organising working class, to stand, without Liberal
opposition, as a small ‘l’ labour candidate for Westminster. Hardie won and in
August 1892 took his seat as an MP.
Questions were asked about where Hardie’s campaign
funds came from. While Hardie presented himself as moving beyond his trade
union background, as Caroline Benn’s definitive biography underlines,
unemployment was even more of an issue in West Ham than it was in Ayrshire. The
Scottish miners understood the link well enough and certainly gave some of the
money for Hardie’s election. The following year he was one of those who formed
the Independent Labour Party.
When it came to the 1900 General Election Hardie, in
era when it was possible to stand in more than one seat, was nominated in both
Preston and Merthyr in South Wales. Preston was never likely at this point, on
a still restricted franchise, to return a labour MP. Hardie’s chances in
Merthyr weren’t thought to be too good either. After all he was a Scot who had
held a seat in London’s East End and was largely unknown in the area.
Hardie however had two things going for him.
Firstly he had been a miner and a miner’s union official. Merthyr was a mining
seat, but one which remained firmly Lib-Lab. This however was the period when the
new Trades Councils were being formed in the area, and they were often a
bedrock of support for independent labour politics.
In a two-member seat Hardie was elected MP and in the
1906 General Election was re-elected with an increased majority. During his
period as MP for West Ham and Merthyr when not representing his constituents in
London, Hardie continued to live in Cumnock in Scotland where he had been based
as a union official.
Hardie’s politics remained as they had developed from
his background. A pacifist, he opposed war, and the First World War on that
basis, not that of anti-imperialism. He was a determined advocate of an
independent labour politics (although one that did deals early on with the
Liberals) and a supporter of women’s suffrage which at that time placed him on
the left of the labour movement. On the left, but certainly no revolutionary as
Victor Grayson the MP for the Colne Valley was.
The central historical point is that Hardie’s trajectory
as a union and labour activist demonstrates that while issues of national independence
are important ones, class politics transcends boundaries.
The spectre of united working class
internationalism that Hardie, and his beard, in a way personified, continues to
not only haunt the right but be of great relevance for the labour movement.
Keith Flett
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