Leaders: Keir Hardie 1906-1908

Keir Hardie (1856 -1915)
James Keir Hardie, more than any other man, was the founder of the Labour Party. He was the first independent labour MP, he was central to forming the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee. In 1906 he was the Labour party's first leader. As strategist, evangelist and legend, he is foremost of the founding fathers.

He was born on 15 August 1856 in Legbrannock, Lanarkshire, the illegitimate son of a farm servant, Mary Keir. In 1859 she married David Hardie, a ship's carpenter; the young boy was known thereafter as James Keir Hardie. He had virtually no schooling and began working in a series of menial jobs in Glasgow at the age of 9. In 1867 the family moved to Newarthill in the eastern Lanarkshire coalfield and Hardie went down the pit at the age of ten. Later he worked in a pit at Quarter, near Hamilton. He worked as a 'trapper' in helping to ventilate the mine; it was dangerous work and the young boy saw many accidents and even fatalities. However, he taught himself to read serious works by Carlyle, Ruskin and others, and also became for a time a fervent member of, and lecturer for, the 'Morisonians' or Evangelical Union, fiercely committed to temperance. He also became a pioneer trade unionist. He was active in a strike of the Lanarkshire pits in the summer of 1880 and in 1881 helped organize the struggling Ayrshire miners. At the age of 23 he gave up the life of a working miner.

Politically still a Liberal, he now became an increasingly forceful journalist in the local Ayrshire press. However in 1886 his political philosophy dramatically changed. A socialist tone appeared in his writings, and also in the programme of the newly-formed Ayrshire Miners' Union. In The Miner he campaigned hard for the Scottish miners to organize. At the 1887 TUG, he launched a fierce attack on Henry Broadhurst and other Lib-Lab union leaders. Though not overtly a socialist, he was clearly pushing labour politics into new radical directions. A key episode came in April 1888 when he stood as Labour candidate, against the Liberal, at Mid-Lanark. It followed his being turned down by the local Liberal Association. He polled only 617 votes, but it gave him a new stature as a working-class leader. He confirmed this in the founding of a new Scottish Labour Party that August, and in further onslaughts on the Lib-Labs at the 1889 TUC.

His activities were taking him far beyond Scotland, however. He attended the new Socialist International in Paris. Then he was nominated for the London constituency of West Ham South. The local Liberals failed to put up a candidate and in the 1892 general election Hardie had a straight contest with the sitting Conservative. He was elected by a comfortable margin and was given a rousing send-off to launch his career at Westminster. Legend marked him down as 'the man in the cloth cap' but in fact he wore a deerstalker, rather like Sherlock Holmes.

His three years as MP for West Ham South, 1892 -5, were mixed ones. A lone figure in the Commons, he generally supported the Liberal government. His main activities were outside the House. In January 1893 he presided over the meeting at Bradford that saw the founding of the ILP, the first avowedly socialist political party, albeit of an ethical, non-revolutionary kind. The next year he founded a weekly newspaper, The Labour Leader. He owned it and wrote all the editorial comment, even at times the women's and the children's column (under the pseudonym 'Daddy Time'). In parliament he made his main mark as 'member for the unemployed', focussing attention on the social consequences of the depression in trade. But he also caused uproar by denouncing the monarchy when a royal birth (the future Edward VIII) coincided with a mining disaster in south Wales.

In the 1895 general election, Hardie lost the votes of many Liberals who now saw him as an extremist, and he was unexpectedly defeated by a Conservative.

The conclusion he drew was that independent labour on its own had little prospect of making headway as a small socialist sect without wider support. After an abortive attempt to form a 'socialist unity' coalition of the ILP and the Marxist Social Democrats, Hardie campaigned indefatigably for a grand alliance of the socialist bodies with the trade unions, to create a party to promote the cause of labour in parliament. In fact, the employers' attacks on unions in the courts and in suppressing strikes strengthened his arguments. In 1899 he won the backing of the Scottish TUC, and then the British TUC voted by 546,000 to 434,000 to attend a conference to 'secure the better representation of labour in the House of Commons'. This was held at Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, on 27 -28 February 1900. Here the Labour Representation Committee came into being. It was dominated by the trade unions, but the key figures on the 12- man executive were socialists like Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. Weak though it was, a new political party to represent labour was launched. Hardie became its founder chairman. He was shortly back in parliament. In a dramatic contest in October 1900, held during the Boer War which Hardie strongly opposed on both pacifist and socialist grounds, he failed at Preston but then won one of the two seats in the Welsh constituency of Merthyr Tydfil. He benefited from the rivalry between the two sitting Liberals. For the next few years, he worked to build up the fledgling LRC. He gained from the Taff Vale verdict which enraged the unions by undermining the right to strike, and many large unions now affiliated to the new party. It was a difficult time, exemplified by personal quarrels when Hardie had to sell up The Labour Leader in 1904. He was also somewhat uncertain about the affiliation of mass trade unions since their outlook tended to be labourist rather than socialist. However, he reasserted his stature with a strong personal crusade against unemployment in 1905.

The key issue, however, was relations with the Liberals. Hardie was always an uncertain supporter of a 'progressive alliance' but he went along with MacDonald's negotiation of the electoral 'entente' with the Liberal chief whip in 1903. As a result, Labour had a clear run in 30 seats in the 1906 election and 29 LRC candidates were returned. They called themselves the Labour Party and, by a one-vote majority over the trade unionist, David Shackleton, Hardie was elected chairman.

His time as leader in 1906 -8 was not a success. Hardie did not enjoy the compromises of leadership and MacDonald made far more impact in parliament. Hardie's health also suffered and he retired as party leader with some relief at the start of 1908. However, his career had taken important new directions. Hardie powerfully backed the women's suffrage movement, reinforced by his close friendship with Sylvia Pankhurst, perhaps his mistress. He clashed with some of the party rank and file in the priority he gave to the women's cause, social as well as political. He also took up key aspects of colonial freedom. On a world tour in 1907 he called openly for Indian self-government when visiting the sub-continent and in meetings in South Africa he scandalized opinion by upholding the rights of black Africans. He wrote a rare book on India (1909) when he returned and also criticised the Union of South Africa Bill for its failure to protect the black majority.

In Britain itself, he was passionate in the defence of democracy. He pressed for local devolution rather than a Prussian-style state bureaucracy, urging that Scotland and Wales should be granted home rule alongside Ireland. He was also a fierce critic of the tactics of the authorities, including the police and the army, in putting down strikers during the disturbances in mining and other areas from 1910 onwards. A pamphlet Killinq No Murder condemned the loss of life at Tonypandy and Llanelli in troubles there. He upheld the right to strike alongside the right to vote. He could lend support to radical outsiders like Victor Grayson and like James Larkin in Ireland. On the other hand, he argued both in the Labour Party and in the Socialist International on behalf of constitutional parliamentary approaches towards the socialist commonwealth His book From Serfdom to Socialism (1907) condemned doctrines of class war.

His final crusade, and greatest disappointment, was on behalf of international peace. At Socialist Internationals he strove to carry a motion endorsing an international strike by the workers to prevent war, and he worked closely with German socialist comrades. When war broke out in August 1914, Hardie condemned the militarist fever but his was a minority voice even in the Labour movement. A meeting in Merthyr was broken up by a jingo mob headed by local miners' leaders. The war years broke his spirit, and his health deteriorated rapidly. He died, a very old man of 59, on 26 September 1915. His death caused an immense outpouring of grief in socialist and labour circles. Bernard Shaw declared that after Hardie's death, his soul would go marching on. But at the resultant by- election in Merthyr, the seat fell to a pro-war union leader, C.B.Stanton, far removed from the pacific ideals of the former member. His daughter, Nan, later married the left-wing pacifist Labour MP, Emrys Hughes.

Keir Hardie was a complicated, passionate, romantic man. He dabbled in spiritualism and there was always a mystical aspect to his outlook. He had extraordinary charisma as a mass crusader; yet he could be difficult in personal relations, not least in money matters. His marriage to Lillie Wilson in 1879 was not tranquil and he found happiness in friendships with young women socialists, including Sylvia Pankhurst. His socialism was essentially ethical and fraternal; he had little interest in economics or the techniques of government. He never held elective office: he was a politician of protest, not a man for power. Yet, both as a strategist and a prophet, he was unique. He took up great causes -unemployment, social welfare, women's suffrage, colonial freedom. In all, his judgement was broadly vindicated after his death. He was also a supreme strategist, politicising the working class by finding a middle way between Lib-Labism and direct action. No-one came close to equalling his achievement in building up a grand alliance of the mass unions and the socialist societies. Of all Labour's pioneers, he was the one that was truly indispensable, in Sylvia Pankhurst's words, 'the greatest human being of our time'.

The fullest biographies of Hardie are Kenneth 0. Morgan, Keir Hardie. Radical and Socialist (1975); Fred Reid, Keir Hardie. the Makinq of a Socialist (1978); and Caroline Benn, Keir Hardie (1992).