Pioneer of socialism in Britain was ahead of his time

PERHAPS I was off that day, but I don’t recall my five years of studying History at Glasgow’s Hillhead High School ever touching upon the life of Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP elected in Britain, the first leader of the Labour Party, a socialist whose writings were devoured around the world, and a Scotsman. In this the 100th anniversary year of his death, an exhibition of his life and work has opened in Cumnock, the Ayrshire mining village where he spent most of his life.

These early revolutionaries can look austere in the old black and white photographs that exist of them. Often that is hardly their fault as they usually had to pose unnaturally stiffly for photographers, which seems to stifle their humour and individualism. So it is heartening to learn that Keir Hardie, wherever he travelled in the world, kept his watch at Cumnock time. As he explained: “By keeping to Cumnock time I could always tell exactly what was being done at home, when the children went to school, when they returned, when they went to bed.”

Richard Leonard, regional organiser of the GMB union, and a keen scholar of Keir Hardie, once told the watch story at a political gathering in Cumnock and was interrupted by someone shouting: “Cumnock time? Aye, 10 years behind everyone else.” But that heckler was from the rival town of Auchinleck, so such verbal sparring is to be expected.

Before arriving in Cumnock, William Keir Hardie was the illegitimate son of a domestic servant from Newhouse in Lanarkshire. Keir, his middle name, was his mother’s surname before she later married. With no schooling at all, he had to go out to work as a message boy at the age of seven, and by 10 years old, was working down the mines, sitting alone in the dark opening hatches to let air in. As he later described it: “For several years as a lad I rarely saw the daylight during the winter months. Down the pit by six in the morning, and not leaving it again until half-past five meant not seeing the sun. Even on a Sunday I had at that time to spend four hours down below. Such an experience does not develop the sunny side of one’s being.”

Fortunately, his parents taught him to read and write in the evenings, and Keir as a teenager went to evening classes. He said himself that he was strongly influenced by the works of Rabbie Burns. With his self-confidence growing, he developed a strong social conscience as well as fluency in public speaking – a must for any politician in these pre-television days. By 21, he was elected as a miners’ union representative, and two years later moved to Cumnock to become secretary of the Ayrshire Miners’ Association. He also started a newspaper, The Miner, which true to publications of that time, had a front page purely of advertisements. A copy on display at Cumnock shows most of

KEN SMITH

AT LARGE the advertisements were for shops supplying pit boots, or timetables of ships departing for America, summing up the two main choices for young folk in Ayrshire.

He was elected to parliament in 1892 as the first Labour MP. Instead of wearing a silk top hat like the Conservative and Liberal MPs, he wore a flat cap and was lambasted in the press at the time. Goodness, the press making fun of new MPs it doesn’t like? It would never happen these days would it?

Richard Leonard kindly met me at the Baird Institute exhibition to discuss Hardie’s life, and he points out how incredible it was that someone who was self-taught went on to inspire people with his socialist writings and beliefs.

Hardie championed workers’ rights, the nationalisation of resources such as the railways and mines, and votes for women, before they became popular. But he has been dead for a hundred years, is any of his writings relevant today? Explains Richard: “In his publication From Serfdom To Socialism, Hardie makes clear the economic object of socialism is to make land and industrial capital common property, and to cease to produce for the profit of the landlord and the capitalist, and to begin to produce for the use of community.” Many would still agree with that observation.

Hardie argued not to abolish capital, but to abolish the capitalist who lived an idle life because he had a monopoly of the capital. Elected to parliament he spoke in the Commons of mass poverty and misery on the one hand, and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few on the other. Some of the maiden speeches at parliament last week by new SNP MPs such as Tommy Sheppard had similar sentiments.

In a parliamentary debate, Hardie argued that the choice was “between an uncontrolled monopoly conducted for the benefit and in the interests of its principal shareholders, and a monopoly owned, controlled and manipulated by the state in the interests of the nation as a whole”. He called for the moral and material elevation of the poor, arguing: “A people depressed, weakened, and enervated by poverty and toil are more likely to sink into a nation of spiritless serfs than to rise in revolt against their lot.”

Richard, as a Labour Party member, believes the present Labour Party can learn from the timeless appeal and enduring message of hope in Hardie’s writings.

But I’m distracted. In the exhibition are references to fellow Ayrshire miner and socialist Andrew Fisher who emigrated to Australia and was that country’s first Labour prime minister, elected to the post three times. He frequently corresponded with Keir Hardie. Fisher later returned to Britain and applied to become the Labour Party candidate in Kilmarnock – but local party members rejected his nomination.

Not for the first time, I realise that understanding Labour Party politics in Scotland is a labyrinthian affair.

‘‘ Wherever he travelled in the world, he kept his watch at Cumnock time so he could tell exactly what was being done at home