1943: Marching with Maxton, rebel with a cause

RUSSELL LEADBETTER

THE Glasgow Bridgeton MP James Maxton, seen here just three years before his death, was, as Gordon Brown wrote in his book My Life,

Our Times, perhaps the most gifted orator of his day. Churchill, no less, thought him the best parliamentarian of his time, Brown added. Brown, who also wrote a biography of Maxton, said he “had taken the slums into Parliament, was one of the first to call for a National Health Service and a welfare state, and was labelled by some as the ‘Children’s Champion’”.

As Maxton’s obituary in the Glasgow Herald in July 1946 noted, “no Scotsman since the days of Keir Hardie has filled so prominent a place in the advance ranks of Labour as James Maxton. He did not seek to disguise his role as that of a revolutionary in social and political welfare. He delighted in being a rebel ... No sacrifice was too great to be undertaken for the principles Maxton espoused. He went to prison because he believed that free speech, even in war time, was a principle that no authority should take away. Yet .... he was the mildest of revolutionaries, and his sincerity was never questioned.”

In 1943 Maxton was photographed during the May Day parade to Queen’s Park. The Independent Labour Party took part but boycotted the meeting, Maxton regretting that most of the marchers believed that a better way of life for mankind “could only be achieved by wading successfully through further slaughter”.