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IN THIS the centenary year of the death of Keir Hardie, he will be remembered as a key founder of the Labour Party and an outstanding MP. It is often overlooked that he regarded trade unions as the working heart of the Labour Party.
He was not always in the Commons but from his time in the pits to the end of his life he identified with trade unions. As a young miner, his radical unionism got him the sack.
There was no Labour Party when Hardie was a miner and many workers supported the Liberal Party which paid some union leaders to be MPs. In 1887, Hardie attended his first TUC conference where he criticised miner MPs who had not backed a Bill for an eight hour day.
Hardie and others formed the Scottish Labour Party, although he was disappointed that only three trade unions backed it. But things were changing. Trade unionists in east London invited him to stand as their parliamentary candidate for West Ham South. He won a sensational victory over the sitting Tory MP in 1892. He was really the first working-class Labour Party MP.
In 1893, he played a leading part in the formation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Significantly, numbers of trade unions became members.
With the press overwhelmingly against him, Hardie lost his parliamentary seat in 1895. Strangely, he was not upset and threw himself into preaching socialism all over Britain as well as backing strikes.
In 1900, the TUC agreed to co-operate with the ILP in fielding parliamentary candidates. In short, the trade unions had mostly left the Liberals and allied themselves with Labour. Perhaps Hardie’s greatest achievement.
In the same year, Hardie was back in the Commons as member for Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales.
In the 1906 election, Labour won 29 seats. Taff Railway sued the rail union for losses caused by a strike and won substantial damages. This could endanger all strikes. Hardie presented a motion to protect unions and publicised that many Liberal MPs had promised reform in their manifestos in order to win votes. The Liberal government capitulated and, amazingly, the motion was passed.
1914 saw the outbreak of war with Germany which Hardie opposed. He died on September 26 1915. He received no tributes in Parliament but hundreds of working-class people followed his funeral cortege in Glasgow.
The Labour Party was well established and, in the years after the war, won 191 seats and formed its first minority government.
Today, it’s a different story for the party. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Labour reduced ties with the trade unions in order to move away from socialism which many trade unions still advocated.
In the era of Ed Miliband, the party has maintained its fears that backing trade unions would lose it middle-class votes.
Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood starkly stated: “Labour are embarrassed about their union roots … We should not expect significant improvements to the rights of employees or enhanced pay conditions should they win the election.”
To be sure, Labour still has some pro-union MPs.
Scottish MP Ian Davidson regrets that the loosening of the bond with trade unions “is likely to increase the takeover of the party by the professional Oxbridge elite.”
But such principled MPs seem to be in a minority. The majority, while still wanting donations from the unions, have not objected to the decline in the number of MPs from trade unions.
For Labour to regain lost ground in Scotland, it must win back the thousands of Labourites who voted for independence. Many of these will be members of or supporters of unions.
Yet new Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy is a Blairite. He’s come under fire from Len McCluskey, leader of Britain’s biggest union Unite, who warned his right-wing stance would cost dearly at the ballot box. His lack of union support is clear — not a single union, even his own GMB, offered any money for his leadership campaign.
I have been a Labour Party member for over 50 years. I joined as a socialist and an egalitarian.
In the year of the centenary of the death of Keir Hardie, it is important to remember that it will best promote the interests of working-class people if closely linked with trade unions. We should follow the principles, policies and practices of Labour’s greatest leader.
- Bob Holman is the author of Keir Hardie: Labour’s Greatest Hero? Lion Hudson, 2010. It is to be reprinted this year.
