Caoimhin O’Murailebegins his foray into socialist thinkers and activists from a bygone age.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the political ideology and concept of socialism gathered momentum. The early socialists, all of them including the Orangeman, William Walker, based their ideas on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Walker was, however very selective as to what parts of Marx he agreed with and those he chose to ignore. For example, the First International, the International Working man’s Association supported Ireland's right to freedom from Britain. This was a part of Marx’s teaching which Walker chose to ignore! I intend to look here at well-known socialists of the early twentieth century, James Keir Hardie, Jim Larkin, Richard O’Carroll, William Walker, William Partridge and James Connolly. The intention is to do one each Thursday, space permitting, in TPQ.

James Keir Hardie - Founder of the British Labour Party

Keir Hardie was born in Newhouse, Lanarkshire near the town of Motherwell in the central low-lands of Scotland on 15th August 1856. His mother, Mary Keir was a domestic servant and his stepfather, David Hardie, was a ship's carpenter. He had little or no contact with his biological father, a coal miner from Lanarkshire. 

The family moved to Govan near Glasgow, later in 1912 incorporated into the city itself, where, despite the financial difficulties faced daily they made a life. David Hardie tried to maintain continuous employment in the shipyards rather than practising his trade at sea, a difficult situation given the boom-and-bust nature of capitalism which affected the industry leading to uncertainties and, inevitably, unemployment. 

Keir Hardie started work at the very young age of seven which meant all forms of formal education came to an end, having hardly began. His first job was as a messenger boy for the Anchor Line Steamship Company. His parents spent their evenings teaching the young James to read and write, skills which would one day prove very useful for self-education. 

Life was not easy for the family and when the Clyde-side employers locked out their workers, the unionised employees were sent home for a period of six months, part of an employer’s offensive against trade union labour and activists, the family’s main source of income was terminated. The family was then forced to sell all their possessions to survive, with young James’s meagre wages the only remaining source of income. His stepfather went to work at sea plying his trade on the waves, obviously being absent from the home which was something he wished to avoid if possible. At the age of ten James went to work down the mines as a trapper – opening and shutting doors for ten hour shifts in order to keep the air supply continuous for the miners.

Keir, as he was now called, had learned to read and write in shorthand and began to associate with Evangelical religious movements where he became a preacher. His ability to orate publicly made him very popular and a choice among his fellow miners to be the logical candidate to become the chairman at their meetings and spokesman for their grievances. The coal owners began to see him as an agitator and a threat and in a short time he and his two brothers were blacklisted from working in the local coal industry. 

At twenty-three Keir Hardie moved seamlessly from the coal mines to trade union organisation work. In May 1879, Scottish mine owners combined to force a reduction in wages, which had the effect of spurring the demand for collective unionisation among the miners. Mammoth meetings were held weekly in Hamilton as miners joined together to vent their grievances and on 3rd July 1879, Keir Hardie was appointed Corresponding Secretary of the miners, a post which gave him the opportunity to contact and maintain communication with other representatives of the mineworkers throughout Scotland. Three weeks later he was chosen by the miners as their delegate to a National Conference of Miners to be held in Glasgow. 

Hardie was appointed Miners Agent in August 1879 and his new role as a trade union organiser had begun. He subsequently led miners strikes in Lanarkshire (1880) and Ayrshire (1881) and from 1886 he was a fulltime union organiser as Secretary of the Ayrshire Miners. As part of the Scottish Miners Federation the Ayrshire Miners Union would, in 1889 become part of the Miners Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) – forerunner of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The MFGB was an amalgamation of all the local miner’s unions throughout Britain and became the backbone of working-class militancy and industrial action, something which remained with the NUM until the year long strike of 1984/85.

James Keir Hardie was one of the founding members of the British Labour Party serving as its first parliamentary leader from 1906 to 1908. After initially supporting Gladstone’s Liberal Party Keir Hardie concluded the working-class needed its own party. Keir Hardie first stood for parliament as an independent in 1888 and later that year he was heavily involved in the creation of the Scottish Labour Party. In 1892 he won the English seat of West Ham, again as an independent, and was instrumental the following year in the formation of the Independent Labour Party. Both the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee along with the Fabian Society would later become component parts of the Labour Party. 

In 1895 he lost his seat and was coming to the realisation that all these small groups, the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation along with independents should come together and form one party. He was re-elected to parliament for Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales as an independent and was now certain the way forward for the labour movement was the unification into one of all these groups. 

In 1900 Keir Hardie helped form the trade union-based Labour Representation Committee which would later be renamed the Labour Party, along with the ILP, the Scottish Labour Party, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and the largely middle-class Fabian Society, which on 15th February 1906 formally became the Labour Party. After the 1906 General Election James Keir Hardie was elected parliamentary leader of the new unified Labour Party. He was a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) also known as the Suffragettes.

The 1906 General Election was one of the biggest landslide victories in British political history for the Liberal Party. It also benefited the Labour Party due to the 1903 agreement between the liberals and Labour where the former agreed not to stand against the Labour Party in thirty constituencies. The Conservatives and Liberal Unionists [a split from the official Liberal Party led by Joseph Chamberlain who opposed Gladstone’s 1886 Home Rule Bill] were wiped out. The deal was to avoid splitting the anti-Conservative vote and was known as the Lib-Lab Pact, resulting in twenty-nine Labour MPs being returned to Parliament.

For all Keir Hardie’s radical, even for their day revolutionary, socialist policies and astute leadership of the infant Labour Party, he was stained by what today we would call racism. We must remember Keir Hardie was talking late 19th early 20th century and, without excusing his comments, perhaps they were not considered as outlandish as they would be today. In fact, today such comments would, rightly so, get him expelled from the party he led until 1908. 

During the nineteenth century the question of race was decided on which class a person belonged to. For example, the industrialists, the bosses, considered themselves a different race to their employees, skin colour was rarely considered relevant when depicting race. In his evidence to the 1899 House of Commons Select Committee on emigration and immigration Hardie argued: ‘the Scots resented immigrants greatly and that they would want a total immigration ban’. When it was pointed out to him that more people left Scotland than entered it, he replied; ‘it would be much better for Scotland if the 1,500 were compelled to stay and let the foreigners be kept out.’ Such a narrative at the time may not necessarily have been considered racist, strange as that seems today. He was actually arguing that any Scottish person wishing to leave should be held back against their will and not be allowed to do so, in case immigrants should come in! According to Hardie; ‘the Lithuanian migrant workers in the mining industry had filthy habits, they lived off garlic and oil and they were carriers of the Black Death.’ This was, even allowing for the times, acute racism of which there is little latitude for excuses.

All in all, James Keir Hardie was a pioneer of the labour and trade union movement in Britain at a time when liberal democracy in its fullest form was in its infancy. He died on 26th September 1915, three years before the Labour Party’s Clause IV was added to its constitution. This was what became the guts and backbone of the British Labour party and - written by two Fabians, Sydney and Beatrice Webb - was inserted into the party’s constitution in 1918. 

Clause IV  gave the party what has been described as ‘a commitment’ to the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and ‘committed the party to socialism’. The nearest Labour came to enacting clause iv was the Labour Government of Clement Atlee in 1945-51 after the immediate post-war election. Atlee nationalised around 20% of the economy, including Coal, Civil Aviation, the Bank of England, Cable and Wireless (entrusted to the Post office), Transport - all in 1946, Electricity 1947, Gas 1948 and in the same year the National Health Service (NHS) was formed. Iron and Steel were nationalised in 1949. These have all been since reprivatized [NHS so far exempted] by the right-wing Thatcher Government, And the right-wing Thatcherite New Labour administration of Tony Blair abolished Clause IV and did nothing to renationalise the majority of the industries once under state ownership. Tony Blair is largely responsible for the mess the British Labour Party is presently in. He tore the guts out of the party, Clause IV, and renamed the party “New Labour” following many of Thatcher’s policies. In fact, Margaret Thatcher is on record as saying; ‘New Labour is my greatest achievement.’

This is the text of the once iconic Clause IV, the guts and spine of the British Labour Party, which is now like a person with their stomach and backbone removed:

Clause IV: To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

James Keir Hardie had been dead three years, thereabouts, when Clause IV was inserted into the party’s constitution. It was, without doubt, the kind of political direction he would have wanted the party to travel. Tony (Tory) Blair removed these guts and backbone of the party because it symbolised the exact opposite of where he wanted the Labour Party to go. 

With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader there was a glimmer of hope that the party had rediscovered its roots, but this was not to last. Corbyn did very well in the 2017 British General Election, removing the Conservative majority in parliament, much to the annoyance and disappointment of his right-wing, Blairite, MPs who collectively did all they could to bring the man down. This they succeeded in, and now that same party is under a new centre right leadership of, ironically, Sir Kier Rodney Starmer. It is not the party which James Keir Hardie gave so much time to moulding into a parliamentary vehicle towards socialism, at a time when such policies were considered revolutionary and dangerous.

In 1908 Hardie resigned as leader of the Labour Party and was replaced by Arthur Henderson. Henderson was nowhere near the radical Keir Hardie was. And, perhaps with hindsight, he epitomised the direction the party would take in the future. Hardie spent the rest of his life campaigning for votes for women and built up a close relationship with the leading suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst. Hardie’s secretary, Margaret Symonds Travers was the first woman to speak in the Houses of Parliament having tricked her way in on 13th October 1908.

As a pacifist Keir Hardie campaigned against the First World War, a position his former party initially grappled with but eventually coming down on the side of the imperialist robbers. Along with socialists in other countries he tried to organise an international general strike to stop the war. His stance was not popular, even though in my own view correct. Even within the Labour Party then, as now, there was a strong pro-war element as well as a small outspoken anti-war faction. He continued to address anti-war demonstrations throughout Britain and supported those considered conscientious objectors.

James Keir Hardie died in a Glasgow hospital at noon on 26th September 1915 of pneumonia aged 59. His friend and fellow pacifist Thomas Evan Nichols delivered the sermon at Hardie's memorial service at Aberdare, in his constituency. Hardie was cremated in Maryhill, Glasgow. A memorial stone in his honour is at Cumnock Cemetery, Cumnock, Ayrshire, Scotland. 

On 2 December 2006, the centenary year of the birth of the British Labour Party, a memorial bust of Keir Hardie was unveiled by Cynon Valley Labour MP, Ann Clwyd, outside the council offices in Aberdare, his old constituency. Despite what today we would call racism, James Keir Hardie should be remembered for all the positives he did. He secured working-class representation for the first time ever in parliament. He was instrumental in the unionisation of the mining industry, he opposed the Frist World War, a brave thing to do at the time and encouraged and participated in the campaign for the vote for women.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is a Dublin 
based Marxist and author. 

Late 19th - Early 20th Century Socialists ➖ Keir Hardie

Caoimhin O’Murailebegins his foray into socialist thinkers and activists from a bygone age.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the political ideology and concept of socialism gathered momentum. The early socialists, all of them including the Orangeman, William Walker, based their ideas on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Walker was, however very selective as to what parts of Marx he agreed with and those he chose to ignore. For example, the First International, the International Working man’s Association supported Ireland's right to freedom from Britain. This was a part of Marx’s teaching which Walker chose to ignore! I intend to look here at well-known socialists of the early twentieth century, James Keir Hardie, Jim Larkin, Richard O’Carroll, William Walker, William Partridge and James Connolly. The intention is to do one each Thursday, space permitting, in TPQ.

James Keir Hardie - Founder of the British Labour Party

Keir Hardie was born in Newhouse, Lanarkshire near the town of Motherwell in the central low-lands of Scotland on 15th August 1856. His mother, Mary Keir was a domestic servant and his stepfather, David Hardie, was a ship's carpenter. He had little or no contact with his biological father, a coal miner from Lanarkshire. 

The family moved to Govan near Glasgow, later in 1912 incorporated into the city itself, where, despite the financial difficulties faced daily they made a life. David Hardie tried to maintain continuous employment in the shipyards rather than practising his trade at sea, a difficult situation given the boom-and-bust nature of capitalism which affected the industry leading to uncertainties and, inevitably, unemployment. 

Keir Hardie started work at the very young age of seven which meant all forms of formal education came to an end, having hardly began. His first job was as a messenger boy for the Anchor Line Steamship Company. His parents spent their evenings teaching the young James to read and write, skills which would one day prove very useful for self-education. 

Life was not easy for the family and when the Clyde-side employers locked out their workers, the unionised employees were sent home for a period of six months, part of an employer’s offensive against trade union labour and activists, the family’s main source of income was terminated. The family was then forced to sell all their possessions to survive, with young James’s meagre wages the only remaining source of income. His stepfather went to work at sea plying his trade on the waves, obviously being absent from the home which was something he wished to avoid if possible. At the age of ten James went to work down the mines as a trapper – opening and shutting doors for ten hour shifts in order to keep the air supply continuous for the miners.

Keir, as he was now called, had learned to read and write in shorthand and began to associate with Evangelical religious movements where he became a preacher. His ability to orate publicly made him very popular and a choice among his fellow miners to be the logical candidate to become the chairman at their meetings and spokesman for their grievances. The coal owners began to see him as an agitator and a threat and in a short time he and his two brothers were blacklisted from working in the local coal industry. 

At twenty-three Keir Hardie moved seamlessly from the coal mines to trade union organisation work. In May 1879, Scottish mine owners combined to force a reduction in wages, which had the effect of spurring the demand for collective unionisation among the miners. Mammoth meetings were held weekly in Hamilton as miners joined together to vent their grievances and on 3rd July 1879, Keir Hardie was appointed Corresponding Secretary of the miners, a post which gave him the opportunity to contact and maintain communication with other representatives of the mineworkers throughout Scotland. Three weeks later he was chosen by the miners as their delegate to a National Conference of Miners to be held in Glasgow. 

Hardie was appointed Miners Agent in August 1879 and his new role as a trade union organiser had begun. He subsequently led miners strikes in Lanarkshire (1880) and Ayrshire (1881) and from 1886 he was a fulltime union organiser as Secretary of the Ayrshire Miners. As part of the Scottish Miners Federation the Ayrshire Miners Union would, in 1889 become part of the Miners Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) – forerunner of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The MFGB was an amalgamation of all the local miner’s unions throughout Britain and became the backbone of working-class militancy and industrial action, something which remained with the NUM until the year long strike of 1984/85.

James Keir Hardie was one of the founding members of the British Labour Party serving as its first parliamentary leader from 1906 to 1908. After initially supporting Gladstone’s Liberal Party Keir Hardie concluded the working-class needed its own party. Keir Hardie first stood for parliament as an independent in 1888 and later that year he was heavily involved in the creation of the Scottish Labour Party. In 1892 he won the English seat of West Ham, again as an independent, and was instrumental the following year in the formation of the Independent Labour Party. Both the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee along with the Fabian Society would later become component parts of the Labour Party. 

In 1895 he lost his seat and was coming to the realisation that all these small groups, the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation along with independents should come together and form one party. He was re-elected to parliament for Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales as an independent and was now certain the way forward for the labour movement was the unification into one of all these groups. 

In 1900 Keir Hardie helped form the trade union-based Labour Representation Committee which would later be renamed the Labour Party, along with the ILP, the Scottish Labour Party, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and the largely middle-class Fabian Society, which on 15th February 1906 formally became the Labour Party. After the 1906 General Election James Keir Hardie was elected parliamentary leader of the new unified Labour Party. He was a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) also known as the Suffragettes.

The 1906 General Election was one of the biggest landslide victories in British political history for the Liberal Party. It also benefited the Labour Party due to the 1903 agreement between the liberals and Labour where the former agreed not to stand against the Labour Party in thirty constituencies. The Conservatives and Liberal Unionists [a split from the official Liberal Party led by Joseph Chamberlain who opposed Gladstone’s 1886 Home Rule Bill] were wiped out. The deal was to avoid splitting the anti-Conservative vote and was known as the Lib-Lab Pact, resulting in twenty-nine Labour MPs being returned to Parliament.

For all Keir Hardie’s radical, even for their day revolutionary, socialist policies and astute leadership of the infant Labour Party, he was stained by what today we would call racism. We must remember Keir Hardie was talking late 19th early 20th century and, without excusing his comments, perhaps they were not considered as outlandish as they would be today. In fact, today such comments would, rightly so, get him expelled from the party he led until 1908. 

During the nineteenth century the question of race was decided on which class a person belonged to. For example, the industrialists, the bosses, considered themselves a different race to their employees, skin colour was rarely considered relevant when depicting race. In his evidence to the 1899 House of Commons Select Committee on emigration and immigration Hardie argued: ‘the Scots resented immigrants greatly and that they would want a total immigration ban’. When it was pointed out to him that more people left Scotland than entered it, he replied; ‘it would be much better for Scotland if the 1,500 were compelled to stay and let the foreigners be kept out.’ Such a narrative at the time may not necessarily have been considered racist, strange as that seems today. He was actually arguing that any Scottish person wishing to leave should be held back against their will and not be allowed to do so, in case immigrants should come in! According to Hardie; ‘the Lithuanian migrant workers in the mining industry had filthy habits, they lived off garlic and oil and they were carriers of the Black Death.’ This was, even allowing for the times, acute racism of which there is little latitude for excuses.

All in all, James Keir Hardie was a pioneer of the labour and trade union movement in Britain at a time when liberal democracy in its fullest form was in its infancy. He died on 26th September 1915, three years before the Labour Party’s Clause IV was added to its constitution. This was what became the guts and backbone of the British Labour party and - written by two Fabians, Sydney and Beatrice Webb - was inserted into the party’s constitution in 1918. 

Clause IV  gave the party what has been described as ‘a commitment’ to the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and ‘committed the party to socialism’. The nearest Labour came to enacting clause iv was the Labour Government of Clement Atlee in 1945-51 after the immediate post-war election. Atlee nationalised around 20% of the economy, including Coal, Civil Aviation, the Bank of England, Cable and Wireless (entrusted to the Post office), Transport - all in 1946, Electricity 1947, Gas 1948 and in the same year the National Health Service (NHS) was formed. Iron and Steel were nationalised in 1949. These have all been since reprivatized [NHS so far exempted] by the right-wing Thatcher Government, And the right-wing Thatcherite New Labour administration of Tony Blair abolished Clause IV and did nothing to renationalise the majority of the industries once under state ownership. Tony Blair is largely responsible for the mess the British Labour Party is presently in. He tore the guts out of the party, Clause IV, and renamed the party “New Labour” following many of Thatcher’s policies. In fact, Margaret Thatcher is on record as saying; ‘New Labour is my greatest achievement.’

This is the text of the once iconic Clause IV, the guts and spine of the British Labour Party, which is now like a person with their stomach and backbone removed:

Clause IV: To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

James Keir Hardie had been dead three years, thereabouts, when Clause IV was inserted into the party’s constitution. It was, without doubt, the kind of political direction he would have wanted the party to travel. Tony (Tory) Blair removed these guts and backbone of the party because it symbolised the exact opposite of where he wanted the Labour Party to go. 

With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader there was a glimmer of hope that the party had rediscovered its roots, but this was not to last. Corbyn did very well in the 2017 British General Election, removing the Conservative majority in parliament, much to the annoyance and disappointment of his right-wing, Blairite, MPs who collectively did all they could to bring the man down. This they succeeded in, and now that same party is under a new centre right leadership of, ironically, Sir Kier Rodney Starmer. It is not the party which James Keir Hardie gave so much time to moulding into a parliamentary vehicle towards socialism, at a time when such policies were considered revolutionary and dangerous.

In 1908 Hardie resigned as leader of the Labour Party and was replaced by Arthur Henderson. Henderson was nowhere near the radical Keir Hardie was. And, perhaps with hindsight, he epitomised the direction the party would take in the future. Hardie spent the rest of his life campaigning for votes for women and built up a close relationship with the leading suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst. Hardie’s secretary, Margaret Symonds Travers was the first woman to speak in the Houses of Parliament having tricked her way in on 13th October 1908.

As a pacifist Keir Hardie campaigned against the First World War, a position his former party initially grappled with but eventually coming down on the side of the imperialist robbers. Along with socialists in other countries he tried to organise an international general strike to stop the war. His stance was not popular, even though in my own view correct. Even within the Labour Party then, as now, there was a strong pro-war element as well as a small outspoken anti-war faction. He continued to address anti-war demonstrations throughout Britain and supported those considered conscientious objectors.

James Keir Hardie died in a Glasgow hospital at noon on 26th September 1915 of pneumonia aged 59. His friend and fellow pacifist Thomas Evan Nichols delivered the sermon at Hardie's memorial service at Aberdare, in his constituency. Hardie was cremated in Maryhill, Glasgow. A memorial stone in his honour is at Cumnock Cemetery, Cumnock, Ayrshire, Scotland. 

On 2 December 2006, the centenary year of the birth of the British Labour Party, a memorial bust of Keir Hardie was unveiled by Cynon Valley Labour MP, Ann Clwyd, outside the council offices in Aberdare, his old constituency. Despite what today we would call racism, James Keir Hardie should be remembered for all the positives he did. He secured working-class representation for the first time ever in parliament. He was instrumental in the unionisation of the mining industry, he opposed the Frist World War, a brave thing to do at the time and encouraged and participated in the campaign for the vote for women.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is a Dublin 
based Marxist and author. 

2 comments:

  1. Gary Robertson writes

    Caoimhin alluded to it but failed to mention that Hardie was a Scottish nationalist and sought or at least leaned toward Scottish independence ...but true Labour was replaced by New Labour and that was the beginning of the end .. the Corbyn attacks were for me the last straw

    ReplyDelete
  2. AM
    Gary is perfectly correct, Keir Hardie did lean towards Scottish independence, another bone of contention like the war for some within the Labour Party. Some, like Hardie leant in this direction others were unionists. Ironically Jeremy Corbyn, despite supporting Irish unification, is less favourable towards Scotland. Then, as now, the Brit Labour Party is broad churched from Corbyn for Irish unity to Belfast born, Kate Hoey, against such unity.
    It was an oversight not to mention the Scottish question, I thought I'd missed some points.

    Caoimhin O'Muraile

    ReplyDelete