J. Keir Hardie

J. Keir Hardie (born Aug. 15, 1856, Legbrannock, Lanark, Scot.—died Sept. 26, 1915, Glasgow) was a British labour leader, first to represent the workingman in Parliament as an Independent (1892) and first to lead the Labour Party in the House of Commons (1906). A dedicated socialist, he was also an outspoken pacifist (from the time of the South African, or Boer, War, 1899–1902) and the chief adviser (from 1903) to the militant suffragists headed by Emmeline Pankhurst.

Unmarried at the time of Hardie’s birth, his mother, a farm servant, later married a ship’s carpenter who was an early trade unionist. In this setting, Hardie became the eldest of a family of nine children, and his childhood, passed partly in Glasgow and partly in the Lanarkshire coalfield, was one of great hardship. He never went to school. He began to work at age seven or eight and became a coal miner at 10. In the late 1870s he was fired and blacklisted by the Lanark mineowners for his strike activity. Moving to Ayr, he was chosen secretary of a miners’ organization. From 1881 he helped to form miners’ unions on a county basis, meanwhile earning his living as a journalist. In his own newspapers, The Miner (1887–89) and Labour Leader (from 1889), he expressed Christian socialist views on labour and on wider political issues. He founded the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, the year in which he was badly defeated in his first attempt at election to the House of Commons. Successful in the 1892 general election, he was a member of Parliament when, at Bradford, Yorkshire, in January 1893, he participated in organizing the Independent Labour Party (ILP). More a propaganda enterprise than a true political party, the ILP was the first socialist group having a genuine Christian, English, and working-class appeal; it was neither middle class and intellectual (as was the Fabian Society) nor specifically Marxist and thus foreign in inspiration and atheistic.

Following the loss of his Commons seat in 1895, Hardie assisted in planning a Labour Party resembling the Liberals and the Conservatives in parliamentary organization. Delegates at a labour conference in London on Feb. 27–28, 1900, formed the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the Labour Party. In the same year, Hardie was returned to Parliament, and, six years later, he was joined in the Commons by 28 other members of the committee, which then became a party organization with an elected leader (at first called the chairman) and party whips. Temperamentally unsuited to the routine administration of a group, Hardie ended his chairmanship in 1907.

As World War I approached, Hardie became primarily concerned with the role of labour in maintaining peace. He sought to bind the Second International to declaring a general strike in all countries in the event of war. His failure in this effort and the decision of a majority of the Labour Party to support British participation in the war caused Hardie to withdraw in disillusion from his colleagues.