Keir Hardie

Scottish labor leader and politician

• Born: August 15, 1856
• Birthplace: Legbrannock, Lanarkshire, Scotland
• Died: September 26, 1915
• Place of death: Glasgow, Scotland

Through agitation and enthusiasm, Hardie, more than any other British politician, helped inspire and organize both the Independent Labour Party and then the more broadly based Labour Party, which became one of Great Britain’s two major parties after World War I.

Early Life

James Keir Hardie was born in a small Scottish mining village; he was the illegitimate child of a farm servant, Mary Keir. Keir later married David Hardie, an erratically employed ship’s carpenter. They had a large family, and two of Hardie’s half brothers later became Labour members of Parliament (M.P.’s). Constant moves and an unsteady income meant that the family circumstances were more like that of unskilled workers than of artisans.

Young Hardie was never apprenticed but began working odd jobs at the age of seven while in Glasgow. When the family moved back to the Lanarkshire coalfields, ten-year-old Hardie started working in the pits and continued working there until his early twenties. Already, Hardie’s boldness, energy, and romanticism were apparent. Having been taught to read at home, he received his only formal education at a night school, improving his writing and learning shorthand. An avid reader, Hardie was enraptured with Robert Burns, both for his Scottish style and for his egalitarian ideas. Reared an agnostic, in his early twenties Hardie was converted to Christianity and joined the Evangelical Union Church, a less doctrinaire and a more evangelical and democratic denomination than the official Calvinist Presbyterian Church. Partially in reaction to his drunken stepfather, Hardie became a strong advocate of temperance. He thus reflected the late-Victorian pattern of self-help and self-control as a way to improve oneself.

In 1879, Hardie married Lillie Wilson, a simple patient woman with whom he had three children. She later kept their home in Cumnock (in Ayrshire, Scotland) when he resided in London. An active and passionate man, Hardie had brief affairs with several women. Hardie was stocky and of average height, but his unconventional dress and heavy beard would soon be the caricaturists’ delight. His black beard turned gray by his late thirties, which reinforced his position as an “elder” pioneer in labor politics and his aura as a working-class folk hero.

Life’s Work

Locally known as a public speaker on temperance, Hardie became involved in trade union activity in 1878, as a result of which he lost his job and never worked as a miner again. He soon became a local miners’ union agent and then secretary of the struggling union in Ayrshire. His militant approach led to two humiliating strike defeats. He attempted but failed to create an effective Scottish Miner’s National Federation.

Young, flamboyant, and well known through his speaking, writing, and trade union activities, Hardie became active in Liberal politics. The Liberal Party was in flux: Its leader, William Ewart Gladstone, was becoming a champion of the masses, his ministry was making both county and national government more democratic, most of its aristocratic element was leaving the party, and a radical wing was developing. Moreover, a few workingmen were elected as Liberal M.P.’s (dubbed “Lib-Labs”).

At that time, Hardie was already evolving a political position of socialism or radical collectivism, advocating increased governmental involvement in society. Thus, it was unlikely that he would be selected as a Lib-Lab candidate when he formally sought the Liberal Party nomination in the 1888 Mid-Lanark parliamentary by-election. Rebuffed, he ran and lost badly as an independent, an experience that made him more distrustful of the Liberals.

At the age of thirty, by which time he was a Socialist, Hardie attended his first Trades Union Congress (TUC) and made incessant attacks on its cautious leaders. Although his views gained wider acceptance by the early 1890’s as the more militant “new unionism” grew, he was still considered by the TUC establishment as a troublemaker. When in 1894 he was neither an active worker at his trade nor a full-time union official, he was barred under new standing orders from being a delegate to the TUC. By then, however, Hardie had persuaded the TUC to advocate the eight-hour day (1891) and nationalization of production, distribution, and exchange (1894).

In 1888, Hardie organized and served as secretary of the short-lived Scottish Labour Party, a loose coalition of various Scottish protest or labor organizations. In 1892, Hardie was elected to Parliament for West Ham South in London’s East End; he succeeded as an independent because of Liberal division there. Although he failed to nurture that constituency and was defeated in 1895, he cut a colorful figure in Parliament for those three intervening years.

Disdaining the staid conventional dress of most members, Hardie entered Parliament in yellow tweed trousers, a serge jacket, and a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker cap, all of which reflected his bohemian love of flashy clothes. While in the Commons, Hardie vehemently protested Parliament’s recognition of a royal birth while it ignored a major Welsh mining disaster. Most significant, Hardie was the first to focus political attention on unemployment, which suddenly expanded during the early 1890’s.

In 1893, while still in Parliament, Hardie was instrumental in founding the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Wanting it to become a broad-based party with significant electoral support, Hardie steered it carefully away from becoming branded merely a doctrinaire organization (“Independent” not “Socialist” was used in its title) and based it on existing local working-class or socialist institutions. Serving as its first chairman (from 1894 to 1900, and later from 1913 to 1915), he then helped it become more centralized. Realizing that the ILP, however, was still only a small party based primarily in the north of England, Hardie championed the creation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC, which became the Labour Party in 1906). It, too, was a coalition of organizations, socialist ones (such as the ILP) as well as many nonsocialist trade unions. Hardie harnessed the financial and electoral support of trade unions to an effective and unified political party separate from the existing main parties.

The general election in 1900 caught the new LRC unprepared, but Hardie was returned to Parliament from the Welsh mining constituency of Merthyr Burghs and served until 1915. He benefited from friendly Liberal support, and in 1903 he agreed with the secret Liberal-Labour arrangement that in certain constituencies the two parties would not compete. That agreement helped Labour win twenty-nine seats in the 1906 election. By a one-vote margin, Hardie was elected Labour Party leader in the Commons (1906-1907). Although not considered a good leader, he did help achieve a reversal of the Taff Vale decision and a guarantee of civil immunity for unions on strike.

Hardie did not have the temperament to serve as spokesperson for a consensus position within the party; he was the bold advocate of minority causes, be they socialist or radical. He opposed the South African (Boer) War (1899-1902), supported the native populations in India and South Africa, and championed the suffragettes. The latter cause hurt him within the Labour movement, for Hardie supported Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union and its extraparliamentary tactics and symbolic violence, as well as its emphasis on enfranchising primarily middle-class women.

Hardie was also an internationalist. He loved to travel, making trips to the United States, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. With his appearance at the inaugural conference of the Second International (1889 in Paris), he became a fixture of international socialism. As with the ILP and the Labour Party, Hardie opposed doctrinaire attempts to exclude unorthodox socialist organizations and to forbid cooperation of socialist parties with nonsocialist ones. An advocate of class solidarity (though not of class war), Hardie opposed the European drift toward World War I and tried in vain to persuade the Second International to declare a general strike should a world war start. When all the major socialist parties of Europe, as well as the British Labour Party, supported their governments’ decisions for war, Hardie was crushed. After suffering from ill health, exhausted by his demanding schedule, Hardie died on September 26, 1915.

Significance

Keir Hardie is the preeminent, first-generation Labour political figure. Agitator, propagandist, crusader, maverick—Hardie inspired two generations of Labour supporters. With little formal education, Hardie guided the creation of a Labour Party linking socialist organizations (which contained some middle-class intellectuals) with the trade unions (mostly of nonsocialist skilled workers). A Scotsman residing in London representing a Welsh constituency for fifteen years, Hardie supported workers everywhere. At a time before radio and television, Hardie carried his message by rousing public speeches and by his newspaper columns throughout Great Britain, and his portrait became a fixture in many working-class homes.

Always vain and egotistical, Hardie did not work well with colleagues. Lax in financial matters and disliking details and procedures, he was never an effective administrator. He spoke and wrote passionately on issues, but he never tried to develop coherent programs for implementing socialism. He disdained theoretical analysis, and his socialism was emotional, rather than intellectual. Hardie’s reputation as the erratic, sometimes irresponsible, flamboyant, pioneering Labour agitator, however, belies his other significant attributes.

Hardie was practical and flexible. To him, socialism was not only a future system but also a practical system to improve the lot of working people in his own day. He realized that the workers needed political representation, not as a minor adjunct of the Liberal Party but through their own party. He also realized that an effective party could not be created from the top; it must be based on existing local organizations.

Hardie’s range became increasingly wider and more effective: He had limited success with the ILP (1893) but achieved a significant victory with the LRC-Labour Party (1900), which finally included trade unions themselves. A romanticist (as well as an evangelical Christian who became also a spiritualist), Hardie never systematized his political views: He advocated a radical stress on personal liberties, governmental actions to improve conditions and eliminate unemployment, and future nationalizations. This broad political spectrum encouraged both socialists and pragmatic trade unionists to participate in the Labour Party. His uncertainty as to whether this early party was a pressure group or a party seeking power furthered its broad-based appeal.

Within ten years of Hardie’s death, Labour replaced the Liberals as one of Great Britain’s two most important parties, even forming a government briefly in 1924. In the 1930’s, the party became more precise in its programs and more determined to gain office to implement them, and it was successful following World War II. Although the pioneering Hardie would seem out of place in the mid-twentieth century party, it was his persistence and organizational foresight that helped make that Labour Party possible.

Bibliography

Bealey, Frank, and Henry Pelling. Labour and Politics, 1900-1906: A History of the Labour Representation Committee. London: Macmillan, 1958. A sequel to Henry Pelling’s The Origins of the Labour Party, this standard work well demonstrates Hardie’s role in moving the LRC toward becoming an effective party by 1906. While stressing Labour’s independence, Hardie worked carefully with the Liberal Party on both the national and local levels.

Benn, Caroline. Keir Hardie. London: Hutchinson, 1993. A critical biography written by the late Caroline Benn, a political activist whose husband, Tony Benn, is a former Labour M.P. and cabinet minister.

Howell, David. British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888-1906. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1983. This is a masterful but complex treatment designed for specialists in the field. Howell brilliantly synthesizes his and many other researchers’ work as he deftly examines local trade union and ILP branches as well as the national ILP center. This major work is a must for any sustained investigation of early labor politics.

Hughes, Emrys. Keir Hardie. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. This is a laudatory biography written by Hardie’s son-in-law and latter-day political disciple. Although uncritical and subjective, Hughes helps re-create the passions and the feuds of Hardie’s life.

Jeffreys, Kevin, ed. Leading Labour: From Keir Hardie to Tony Blair. London: I. B. Tauris, 1999. Contains biographies of every Labour leader during the past one hundred years, including Hardie.

Laity, Paul. The British Peace Movement, 1870-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. A history of the peace movement, based on previously unused materials in the Peace Society Archive. Includes information about Hardie’s participation in the movement.

McLean, Iain. Keir Hardie. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. This excellent brief biography is favorable toward, but not uncritical of, its subject. It is the best introduction to Hardie, and it also explains background issues well for nonspecialist readers.

Morgan, Kenneth O. Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975. This is the best comprehensive Hardie biography. Its generally favorable coverage fails to capture Hardie’s flamboyance. It concludes with an excellent chapter relating Hardie’s legacy on the party throughout the twentieth century.

Pelling, Henry. The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880-1900. London: Macmillan, 1954. This standard, judicious appraisal focuses primarily on the function of socialist organizations (and deliberately de-emphasizes trade unions) in establishing the Labour Party. Hardie’s successes are recognized clearly in this treatment.

Reid, Fred. Keir Hardie: The Making of a Socialist. London: Croom Helm, 1978. Treating Hardie’s early life through 1895, Reid focuses on his childhood, the fluid 1880’s, and Hardie’s establishing the ILP. Exhaustingly researched, it provides a deeper and more subtle understanding of Hardie’s personality and his evolving political concepts.