Keir Hardie: the child in the dark

The Paul Richards column

Until the day he died of a broken heart in 1915, Keir Hardie carried a silver pocket watch. On it were the teeth-marks of a favourite pit pony who had tried, unsuccessfully, to eat it. The experience of the pits left their mark on Hardie too. He was sent down the mines at the age of ten, and worked as a miner until his early twenties, when the mine owners blacklisted him for agitation. It is hard to know what working for twelve hours a day in the black of a mine tunnel does to a little boy of ten or eleven. Hardie resolved to learn to read and write, to improve his lot, and to improve the lot of every worker like himself. Philip Snowden, a future Labour chancellor of the exchequer, wrote that Hardie was spurred on to learn to read and write when he signed up to the Good Templars, an organisation of the temperance movement, but was ashamed that he couldn’t write his own name.

His first chosen tool was the trade union. He organised the Lanarkshire miners and led them into a strike. He rose to become president of the Scottish miners’ union. He founded two newspapers, The Miner and the Labour Leader, and wrote articles throughout his life. Hardie converted to evangelical Christianity. In 1910 he said: ‘The impetus which drove me first into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which has carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined.’

He stood for Parliament and came last. In 1892 he stood as an Independent Labour candidate in West Ham South, in the East End of London, and was elected, beating the Tory thanks to a nonaggression pact with the Liberals. He lost in 1895. He turned up to Parliament in a cap, tweed suit and red tie, and caused outrage by refusal to conform to the dress code.

Hardie displayed huge bravery in his political career. He backed suffrage for women, and became a great friend and ally of the Pankhursts. He was arrested at a Suffragette rally in Manchester. His biographer Kenneth O. Morgan called him ‘the greatest-ever male feminist’. He opposed the Boer War. He spoke out against the monarchy and was banned from garden parties. He supported a national minimum wage and a tax-funded health service. He spoke out against racial segregation in the British Empire, especially South Africa, and for self-rule for India.

In 1900 Hardie helped to found the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) and was elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil, one of two Labour MPs. Hardie never found his voice in Parliament; nor did he make a very effective party leader. The compromises and concessions of politics did not suit his evangelical passions and conviction politics. His pacifism led him to oppose Britain’s entry into the First World War; he was desperate to persuade the Second International to organise a general strike across Europe to prevent war. He died in 1915, as the few remaining members of the professional British army of the original expeditionary force were dying in increasingly futile trench battles. He was heartbroken at his failure to prevent the carnage.

Hardie never held ministerial office. He never saw the Labour Party form a government. His name is not associated with any great Acts of Parliament or reforms. Yet if Morris was a prophet, Hardie was a saint. In the corner of a room in his home in Cumnock in Ayrshire was a walking stick presented to him by his friend and admirer Mahatma Gandhi. Hardie belongs in that pantheon of visionaries and leaders, which includes Gandhi and Martin Luther King, whose power came from their moral force, not any office of state. He built the Labour Party, based on the trade unions and socialist groups, as a great power in the land. His socialism was non- Marxist, based on ethical principles and indignation at injustice.

It was a non-theoretical kind of socialism. He was no fool. His education was wide and deep. Yet he rejected theories and textbook definitions, preferring practical answers. His was not the socialism of the central state. It was based on mutual aid and small local organisations, such as the branches of the miners’ federation. He would have been unimpressed with the bureaucracy and alienation that characterised the nationalised industries and welfare state half a century after his death. He was no Fabian paternalist, unlike the Webbs (Beatrice didn’t like him). He had a colossal faith in working people’s capacity to take control of their own lives.

The causes he chose to champion – feminism, anti-racism, child labourers, anti-imperialism, pacifism – put him on a collision course with the received wisdom of the day, even within the Labour movement. Leaders of the trade unions were touring the industrial areas recruiting workers to the army when Hardie was trying to prevent the war. Yet on each issue, history judges him right.

In 1897, he issued his Christmas message:

“I am afraid that my heart is bitter tonight, and so the thoughts and feelings that pertain to Christmas are far from me. But when I think of the thousands of white-livered poltroons who will take Christ’s name in vain, and yet not see His image being crucified in every hungry child, I cannot think of peace. I have known as a child what hunger means, and the scars of those days are with me still and rankle in my heart, and unfit me in many ways for the work to be done.”

The little boy underground in the dark, surrounded by the rough voices of the miners and the stamp and snort of the pit ponies, went on to become an MP and establish and lead a great political movement, but the smell of coal-dust never left his nostrils.

Next week: RH Tawney

Labour’s Revival by Paul Richards is out now.