The Coal Dust Coronet : James Keir Hardie

The founder of the Labour Party Keir Hardie would probably ask himself today just how far have they got in over a hundred years. Born 15th August 1856 Keir was born into a working class family; his mother Mary Keir a domestic servant, and his stepfather a ship's carpenter. Keir was put to work at only seven; at least that doesn't happen to today's children, but child poverty is a fact of life, now as then. Keir became a message boy for the Anchor Line Steamship Company and he had no formal education. It was only his parents that taught him to read and write for they had the prescience to see the need for it.

He spent his boyhood in various jobs and at ten Keir went to work in the mines as a trapper, maintaining the air supply for miners. Then he became a pony driver and then a hewer. By the time he was twenty he was a skilled miner. But he was an ambitious young man and wanted a life beyond the mines. He was to become the voice of the working class. He achieved this, learning how to speak in public by joining the Evangelical Union, which was later to form the United Reformed Church. 

 He spent time preaching before becoming the spokesperson for the miners. He became a trade union organizer and like Arthur Scargill after him worked to increase miner's wages. He then became a journalist working on the paper the Cumnock News, a pro-liberal paper. In 1887 he launched his own publication 'The Miner'. He then ran for West Ham South in 1892, a working class seat and won it, being first off a Liberal. In 1893 Hardie and others disillusioned by Liberalism founded the Independent Labour Party. This of course worried the Liberals, a major political force at the time. It wasn't until 1900 that Keir was instrumental in forming the modern Labour Party and he was elected junior MP for Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare, a stronghold of the Welsh mining community. It took twenty four years for the party to gain power in government but in 1924 they won the election.

In his later career Hardie helped the suffragettes, he advocated self-rule for India, and called for an end to segregation in South Africa. He would have no idea he would have to wait for a man like Nelson Mandela to really achieve these aims in South Africa and finally put an end to apartheid.

When the war came in 1914 he was a staunch pacifist and made anti-war demonstrations, but his most important policies were to make work pay much like the Conservatives are trying to do today, though in Hardie's day there were no TV programmes about living on benefit and seemingly getting by quite well, as on the Tilery estate, Stockton. But those people portrayed are all pro working and none of them do not work by choice.

It was his idea to get a minimum wage policy and Labour only achieved this a few years ago. He also advocated universal pensions. It seems strange to think things he advocated are only being realized today, one hundred years on. The wheels of change certainly turn slow. He also wanted free school meals, something the Liberal Democrats have taken up today, funnily enough. Politics is almost in a time warp. We can go back a hundred years and still be discussing the same old things, but Keir Hardie wore the coronet as prime mobile, a coronet coated in coal dust.