Just Finished Reading: Keir Hardie – Labour’s Greatest Hero? By Bob Holman (FP: 2010)

Keir Hardie was born into abject poverty just outside Glasgow in 1856. Largely self-educated by reading discarded newspapers and his mother’s Bible along with later help from the local Temperance Union he briefly became the families primary breadwinner at age ten when his adopted father was forced out of work. Graduating from bakery delivery boy to managing pit ponies in the local coalmine he was involved in a mine shaft collapse as a teenager. As he grew older he discovered that he had the gift of oratory – not from a sophisticated speaking technique but from heartfelt and simply expressed beliefs in the value of work and working class lives. But the last thing his employer wanted was a young man, with radical ideas, able to sway his fellow workers to action so both he and his brother were sacked as potential troublemakers. Here Hardies luck changed and he was taken on at a local workers newspaper where he began to excel as a writer of political prose. Informed by his upbringing and his deep belief in the lessons of Christianity he began edging away from the primary opposition to Toryism at the time – Liberalism – and towards a new political stance: Socialism. Still a half formed thing Hardie and others in his immediate circle built the foundations of socialist thought with a British (indeed Scottish) flavour distinct from the European (largely Franco-German) strand. Never a Communist and certainly never an Atheist he helped to found the Independent Labour Party and eventually became the very first Labour MP in the Houses of Parliament.

This was an interesting little book (at just 207 pages) about a largely forgotten politician and social reformer. Few would know his name and fewer still would know his story these days unless they are scholars of left-wing or Labour history. I had heard of him from my father (who, looking back on it, I’m beginning to think was far more Left-wing than I thought!) and from comments in an obscure 1980’s TV comedy series called ‘Brass’. Spoken of in hushed mythic terms Keir Hardie helped to create the Labour Party in Britain almost out of thin air and championed the common man – and even more radically for the time the common woman – with his every breath. Both attacked and feared by most of the press, the ruling elites and the Church (or those parts of the Church to feel the lash of his tongue for their lack of basic Christian charity) he soldiered on with single minded determination to make the lives of the Working class better in any way he could. He certainly deserves to be better known than he is presently. Despite several faults this book might help in bringing him back to the notice of the people he spent his life’s energy trying to lift up. Reasonable.