COALMINER from the age of 10, trade union organiser, member of Parliament for 18 years, founder-leader of the Independent Labour Party, anti-imperialist, socialist educator and agitator and much more: James Keir Hardie died 100 years ago today on September 26 1915.

Born just outside Glasgow in 1856 and dead before he reached 60, his life shortened by a war he had passionately opposed and which broke him emotionally and physically, Hardie was no marginal historical figure.

Profoundly serious, high principled, “the member for humanity” exuded endless energy and resolution, was seen as formidable and was formidable.

Kenneth Morgan’s major biography of 1975 averred: “Hardie’s achievement remains immense.” Caroline Benn’s 1992 study reflected: “His socialism is very much alive, and awaits its day.”

Always courageous, his opposition to WWI in his final 13 months of life was his last legacy to the labour movement.

On August 2 1914, two days before Britain entered that terrible conflict, Hardie declared to great applause in Trafalgar Square that the only class able to prevent war was the working class, which could do so through an anti-war strike.

The workers of each country, he insisted, had no quarrel with each other, and decisions breeding war had been made over their heads.

Almost a week after war had begun, as MP for Merthyr Tydfil since 1900, Hardie demanded in the house to know what was to be done for the poor who would suffer.

He asserted his anti-war position in plain terms: “We belong to a party which is international. In Germany, in France, in Belgium, in Austria, the party corresponding to our own is taking all manner of risks to promote and preserve peace.”

An honourable member asked: “Why do they not control the German Emperor?”

“For the same reason that we do not control the Liberal Cabinet — we are not strong enough,” replied Hardie.

“With a self-reliant working class,” he wrote in his last lengthy article on March 27 1915, “there could be no foreign diplomacy; no arrogant militarism; no war, and no stream of untold wealth pouring into the coffers of the rich from across the seas … The present war, like most others, has come because many great and powerful interests demanded that it should…”

It had been in the late 1880s, after a slow political journey away from liberalism, that Hardie arrived at the socialist convictions from which he would never retreat.

He set out his mature beliefs in 1907 in a little book, From Serfdom to Socialism, in which Marx’s Capital was at the top of a recommended reading list, and later in a pamphlet entitled My Confession of Faith in the Labour Alliance.

In the latter he concluded that the founders of both the ILP and the Labour Party were “in the direct line of apostolic succession from Marx and the other great master minds of socialist theory and policy.”

Hardie’s Lanarkshire childhood was deprived of formal education, replaced by miserably paid and dangerous employment. He worked more than 12 hours a day even before going down the pit. “Errand boy” was his first job at the age of eight.

With the help of his mother, fierce determination and night school later on, he learned to read and write fluently. In the mine he had what were considered boys’ jobs before working at the coalface.

Aged 23, married and Cumnock-based, Hardie was already a local miners’ leader. At meetings he urged organisation and standing together.

The confidence of fellow miners elected him secretary, while the wrath of owners soon brought him dismissal and blacklisting in Lanarkshire pits. But miners’ secretary he remained, and when the men struck, he was everywhere in support.

After next becoming secretary of the Ayrshire miners, he built another miners’ organisation, undeterred by threats of personal violence from owners and stooges.

The money ran out for Hardie’s pay, but through a lucky break and through having earlier — perhaps uniquely for a miner in those days — mastered the art of writing shorthand, he soon made shift as a local newspaper correspondent.

From 1886 he was again secretary of the Ayrshire miners, and soon after that of the newly formed Scottish Miners’ Federation. In 1887 he founded The Miner, a monthly paper.

In 1888 came a seminal moment. He stood as an independent Labour candidate — the first ever in Britain — in a by-election for the parliamentary seat of Mid-Lanark.

His message was basic: “I want to be sent to Parliament by working men, to be paid by working men and kept by working men to speak for working men.”

Coming third and last — at a time when women were banned from voting altogether and many men failed the property qualification — he still took more than 8 per cent of the vote.

Defeat in Mid-Lanark was a catalyst for the formation of a Scottish Labour Party three months later. Its programme included land and transport nationalisation and more taxation of the rich.

Growth in Hardie’s national reputation led to his taking up an invitation to stand as a Labour candidate for the constituency of South West Ham in 1892.

Speaking to dock labourers in his election campaign, he said: “It is not my fight, men, it is yours … If you return me to the House of Commons, I will fight for you.” His victory this time was comfortable.

In the house he repeatedly attacked the government for its neglect of the unemployed.

“The government that does not legislate for the unemployed,” he said, “does not deserve the confidence of this house.”

Hardie’s parliamentary voice was a driver for the creation of the Independent Labour Party (which absorbed the Scottish Labour Party) at Bradford in 1893. Its programme included “taxation to extinction of all unearned income.”

In March 1894, Hardie’s monthly paper, The Miner, renamed the Labour Leader, became a weekly and the official voice of the ILP.

In June 1894 the Commons congratulated Queen Victoria on the birth of a grandchild, passing over the tragic deaths the very same day of hundreds of miners in a south Wales mining disaster as of no special consequence.

Hardie protested with angry eloquence, calling vainly for a vote of condolence to “the relatives of those who are lying stiff and stark in a Welsh valley.”

When Hardie lost his seat in 1895, he concentrated on party-building. He spoke at innumerable meetings, including meetings of strikers and in 1899 spoke and wrote against the Boer war. It was, he said, “a capitalist’s war.”

In 1900 the Labour Representation Committee was formed with large input from Hardie, who was that year elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil.

In 1906 new Labour candidates joined him in the Commons, making the parliamentary group 29-strong, and the committee was retitled the Labour Party.

Hardie introduced a Bill granting women the vote. In India in 1907, to government outrage, he proposed for that country self-rule on the Canadian model.

The same year, in South Africa, he called for political rights for the black majority, and came within an ace of being lynched.

In 1908 he attacked the big armament vested interests, warning of the war danger. In 1909 he denounced a visit by the tsar. In 1910 he proposed a general strike to prevent war at a Socialist International Conference.

He also demanded an inquiry into Winston Churchill’s belligerent dispatch of masses of police and troops into the Welsh valleys, a man having been killed at Tonypandy.

In 1911 two more were killed at Llanelli, occasioning Hardie’s powerful condemnation in his pamphlet Killing No Murder.

Though it has taken precisely a fortnight less than a century after the death of James Keir Hardie for another fully rounded socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, to lead the Labour Party, the event has come to pass.

Echoing Caroline Benn, Corbyn’s socialism like Hardie’s is very much alive, and also awaits its day. I hope this year’s Labour Party conference will take note.