AFTER nearly two decades, the red rose is blooming at No 10 Downing Street. New Labour's widely anticipated landslide victory under Tony Blair will very likely be credited as the fourth and greatest of the electoral watersheds which have ushered in sea changes in British politics this century; the others being the Liberal landslide of 1906, the Labour victory of 1945 and the 1979 triumph of the Tories.
So Labour will see out the millennium. Ideologically, however, it has travelled a great distance from the vision articulated over a century ago by its founder, a man who lived among Irishmen and fought alongside them in their struggle for class emancipation.
Celtic Heritage
The founder of the modern Labour movement was himself a Celt. James Keir Hardie was born in 1856 in Lanarkshire, the illegitimate son of Mary Keir, who later married David Hardie, an alcoholic sailor. Sent down the coal pit at an early age, the young Keir Hardie became active in labour disputes and after a strike in 1897 was victimised for it.
Forced out of the area along with his wife, Lillie, he supplemented his income from trade union organisation with journalism and edited a new paper, the Miner, which campaigned for land nationalisation, free education and a clampdown on the liquor trade.
Initially he threw his lot in with the Liberal Party, which was then the party of the entrepreneur and tradesmen, but soon realised its interests were at odds with the socialist creed he espoused, a creed drawn more from the New Testament than Marxism.
He first stood as a Labour candidate at the 1888 Mid Lanark by election, and though he lost he succeeded in drawing considerable press attention to the issue of working class representation. Shortly afterwards the Scottish Labour party was formed, and on July 4th, 1892, James Keir Hardie was elected as the member for West Ham South, England's first Labour MP.
Branching Ont
In 1893, realising that he needed an organisation outside parliament to advance Labour's cause, he chaired the formation of the Independent Labour Party. Its membership comprised Fabian socialists, union activists and Marxists; soon it had over 400 branches. Hardie lost his seat in 1895, but five years later was back as member for Mervyn Taylor.
In the intervening years, he had helped persuade the unions to join the Labour Representation Committee and became involved in the selection of candidates. When the Liberals won outright in 1906, Hardie was joined in the Commons by 28 others who now called themselves the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).
He was not a success as leader. Outflanked by rivals such as David Shackleton and Ramsay MacDonald, who was to become the first Labour prime minister, Hardie floundered, those on the left of the party doubting his socialist and trade unionist credentials, the trade unionists decrying his refusal to countenance a Lib-Lab pact.
Within two years he had resigned as leader, following an illness. He kept up his work as an MP, wrote for journals, campaigned for the unemployed, visited Britain's colonies and addressed large meetings right up to his death on September 26th, 1915.
He had always acknowledged Ireland's contribution to his thinking. His career was inspired by that of Michael Davitt. The Labour Party's success in forging a separate identity owed much to Parnellite endeavours a generation before. And when the 1906 election returned a vastly inflated Liberal presence and a reunited Irish Party, Labour had no problem in identifying with the cause of Home Rule, even if its analysis of the Irish situation was at best woolly.
Keir Hardie grew up and contested in areas with strong working class Irish populations. Now that the land question was being solved, many of these people placed their hopes with the Liberals and Home Rule; they were at first not inclined towards Labour, as they could imperil Home Rule by splitting the anti Tory vote.
Links With Ireland
This was despite the presence of such candidates as James Sexton, Tom McCarthy and Pete Curran, who had begun their careers in the nationalist movement. It was only after the Great War and Independence that the Irish community in Britain truly identified with Labour.
Earlier Hardie had angrily asked of Irish voters in West Ham South: "So you say that it is a case of Home Rule first? I can understand an Irishman in Connemara saying that, but here it is Labour first." The anti socialist stance of Irish priests at this time did not help either.
But despite this, and given the often poor relations the Irish Labour Party had with its English counterpart, Hardie took a keen interest in Ireland. This was especially true during the 1913 lockout when Dublin's workers, under Jim Larkin, were pitted against William Martin Murphy and the power of the bosses and police.
Hardie attended the funeral of James Nolan, a member of the infant Irish Transport and General Workers' Union who died following injuries he received from police batons on Eden Quay on August 13th, a day known as "Bloody Sunday". It was partly due to Hardie's intervention on the locked out workers' behalf that the English Trades Union Congress organised supplies for the emergency kitchens set up in Liberty Hall, for the relief of these men and their dependents.
During the six month lockout, which ended in January 1914, helpers at Liberty Hall included Countess Markiewicz and Francis Sheehy Skeffington's wife, Hanna, a prominent pacifist and suffragette, who was the Dublin correspondent of the Daily Herald, the paper edited by a future Labour Party leader, George Lansbury.
James Keir Hardie, worn out by politics and an unhappy personal life (his affair with the suffragette Emily Pankhurst ended in 1912) died without seeing Labour in power, Ireland or the other colonies independent, or even Europe at peace. But the party of Attlee, Wilson and now Blair undoubtedly owes its place in history to his efforts almost a century ago.