Political aims of 1910 still apt today
Dear Editor I was drawn to the article by Elspeth King, in the Observer of May 10, 2017, alluding to two former giants of the Labour movement, James Keir Hardie and Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham.
I wonder how many, if any, of your readers are aware of the two men particularly Cunninghame Graham, and if they scrutinised the aspirations of the party outlined on the image of Keir Hardie’s 1910 Merthyr election poster which accompanied the article.
I was thinking how apposite those aspirations are because they are still being fought over,
The aims included: ‘right to work; ‘people not peers (no unelected second chamber of Parliament), and living wage. They also sought nationalisation of key industries and home rule (independence) for Scotland.
Cunninghame Graham coming from an extremely privileged establishment background is perhaps the more interesting, though Hardie may be the best remembered of the two.
Cunninghame Graham was a flamboyant swashbuckler whose life was stranger than fiction. Known as Don Roberto in Argentina where he was a cattle rancher and gaucho, he returned home and embraced radical socialism becoming the first socialist MP and as the article states both men served periods at Westminster representing the dispossessed working classes.
Both men were imaginative, principled, idealistic visionaries but they had been active long before that.
Neither man lived to see much of their radical ambitions realised but a burgeoning 20th century Labour Party achieved much of their hopes only to see them dashed by an increasingly reactionary Tory Party and a New Labour Party under the control of the svengali Blair who cared nothing for the dispossessed or what was left of the working classes.
The current leader of Labour espouses the values, aims and ambitions of the founders of his party, ie the betterment of society as a whole. Acknowledged even by his enemies as a decent principled man, he is caricatured, reviled and denigrated not just by the usual suspects but also by the Blairite rump of the parliamentary Labour Party who blame him for their own treachery and failings.
The supreme irony is that so traduced have the radical compassionate principles of the Labour Party become as a result of internecine bloodletting that Hardie and Cunninghame Graham would have proved unacceptable for membership, or on their own terms been unable to identify with such a party. How can the voters take seriously such a party whose sitting MPs do not support their own democraticallyelected leader and want him gone?
John Fowler Benview Bannockburn