| Mays
ye Work

KEIR
HARDIE

The man who
inspired millions
of socialists

By R.PAGE ARNOT

AN
0 stunted years ago in
in the ne at Legbrannock
shin, Ming area of Lanark-
7 ens Keir Hardie was
| ning’ est son of a family of
Ftp father was «stig
m eee mother a do-
ee to earn a few pen-
e age of 84%, at work
mine at the age of
i Rake his earliest
e
Mg clase ard lot of the

ej Was
/ ing
Brie dent

Ties at

Coal
ten, the b

MP in
of the in-
ta the fi n abor
, ou party and
; | Labo: ene of the British

Ae dieg 3;

Fits oo years ago in the

fart, at War  broken-
what seemed the

e had striven

has ha ee of Keir Hardie
oft appeal in th
Sally j movement, es-
ores eleteti
: use
4S successo
, Sainst Suiveism. and
Proac a8 been used Sas
€se same men
Nduct has been
Contrast to the
ardie.

eir
i Sta « co
tepy ttn

the outli

a ne of
BS bene ne actually was
Enlarged and
beyond recog-

not a great
Speaka..Vtiter or even

ete but he had a
. f the capital-
— that € Single-mind-
1S Own class
wn political
this and
im to re-
Sa strong

its
i 10n
Men, oe lies ps
Ss hi
8. lS cla

But if this was his strength,
his weakness was equally ap-
parent in an inability to grasp
the theory of socialism in all
its depth.

For Hardie, socialism had an
emotional appeal (which he
communicated to tens of
thousands of workers) but be-
yond this his weakness in the-
ory made him a prey to clev-
erer and less scrupulous men.

He was fascinated by Ram-
say MacDonald, whom he con-
sidered to be the movement’s
“sreatest- intellectual asset,”
even though he was from time
to time repelled by Mac-
Donald’s sycophancy to the
ruling class.

When the party he had
founded turned out to be other
than he had hoped, he was un-
able because of this weakness,
to steer it as he would have
wished and in his later years

sion and war.

he was carried along on the
current, yielding approval to
policies which in his earlier
years hé would have despised
and repudiated.

No longer the captain or the
helmsman of the Labor party,
he became the figure head on
a vessel which others steered
on an alien course. The crash
of August 1914, when the ves-
sel ran on the rocks, left him
broken-hearted.

*

It was in this mood that I
found him in the late fall of
1914, when his health had al-
ready giyen way and there

was no fight left for him. The

hope of peace, working class
independence and socialism
had been shattered. He was
a man in despair.

It is not, therefore, the later
but the earlier years of Keir

Hardie’s life that provide a
record to which younger men
in the working class might
well pay heed.

The younger miner in Quar-
ter Pit in Lanarkshire, striv-
ing on behalf of his fellow-
workers until his outspoken
advocacy of their needs made
him and his brother a victim
of the coal operators, the vic-

timized miner making his
brave attempt to gather the
colliers into a Hamilton

Miners’ Union in 1879 — these
are the ‘opening scenes of
Gardie’s adult life at a time
when the employers’ attacks
nearly destroyed the miners’
unions in the West of Scot-
land.

Today, with trade unions a
hundred-fold stronger, we can
look with admiration and per-
haps a little shame on the Keir
Hardie in 1881 leading the

Ayrshire miners in a strike ~

without accumulated funds or
strike benefits that lasts for
ten weeks; or on his gather-
ing the miners around Cum-
nock into an Ayrshire Miners’
Union in 1886, and his work
in forming a short-lived nat-
ional federation of Scottish
miners from 1886 to 1888.

*

Hardie in those years was
typical of the development of
miners’ leaders. He was a
Good Templar, a local preach-
er for the Evangelical Union
(he had’ abandoned his
parents’ standpoint as free-
thinkers), an active member
of the Liberal party headed
by Gladstone.

Hardie was not one of the
socialist pioneers; even at the
Mid-Lanarkshire by - election
of April 1888, when having
been dropped as Liberal can-
didate he stood as a miners’
leader against the official
Liberal, he stated in his elec-
tion address that

“On questions of general
politics I would vote with
the Liberal party to which

I have all my life belonged.”

But in the middle of that
year (1888) he had helped to
form the Scottish Labor party,
the forerunner of the In-
dependent Labor party in
1893, and then of the Labor
party.

Today it is the British Communist

party,,one of whos

e rallies is sh

own above, that leads the fight against colonial oppres-

For, with democratic tradi-
tions nourished by his reading
of Robert Burns’ poetry, Har-
die could not tolerate the sec-
ond class citizenship allotted
to working men inside the
Liberal party. Independent
labor representation was his
remedy.

Soon Hardie was to be class-
ed also among the socialists:
for his strong class feelings
brought him up against not
only the official Liberals but
against the trade union offici-
als who kept British trade
unionists tied to capitalist
party politics.

As representative of the
Ayrshire miners, Keir Hardie,
in the Trades Union Congress,
launched bitter attacks on
other trade union leaders.
These in turn retorted on Har-
die in language which is not
unfamiliar to us today when
attacks are being made on
Communists in the unions.

In 1889 the TUC leadeys.
made a declaration about the
socialists - (Tom Mann; Keir |
Hardie and others), saying:

“Their emissaries enter
our camp in the guise of
friends, in order that they
may the better sow the seeds
of disruption. Let the work-
ers beware of them.”

The TUC secretary ended
his speech against Keir Har-
die’s motion by asking the
TUC “to hound these creatures
from our midst.”

The battle against the Lib-
Labs, as they were called,
went on throughout the nine-
ties and into the first decade
of this century, until they
capitulated to the pressure of
the workers within the unions.

But it was not a band of
parliamentary socialists that

nose Keir Hardie as chair-
man in 1906.

Thereafter Hardie was
chained. From time to time he
broke loose. He was the only
man in the pre-1914 Labor
party who fought against co-
lonialism with understanding.

He fought for workers on
strike, as witness his clash
with Winston Churchill at the
time of Tonypandy in South
Wales. He fought against war.

In what quarter today can
we find these best aspects of
Keir Hardie repeated?

si a. Ge : : é

SEPTEMBER 7, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 11

|
1

en aT ni ROD

Sy ae

or

erases