Keir Hardie was a fascinating and
impressive character, as I’ve discovered from his biography by Bob Holman. It’s
little wonder that he is often referred to as a hero. A brief account of his
life by Professor Holman, https://keirhardiesociety.co.uk/about-keir-hardie/, begins,
“Born illegitimate and in poverty in 1856 and working in the coal mines from
the age of ten. Yet Keir Hardie was to become the main founder of the Labour
Party. An active trade unionist, he was sacked by the pit owners and became a
trade union official, living in Cumnock with his wife, Lillee, where he was
active in a local church.” Near his conclusion he writes, “He should… be
praised for the life he led. He put principles into individual practice. He
lived modestly and never used politics to enrich himself. He wanted no honours.
He spent little time with social elites and always kept in touch with ordinary
people. We need his like today.”
Which perhaps goes some way to
explaining why he was generally loathed by the press, controlled then as
generally now by very rich press “barons”. He continually attacked vested
interests. He considered the exploitation of workers as a flagrant violation of
the Gospel imperative to love your neighbour as yourself and wasn’t afraid to
say so. When he died, only his local newspaper in Scotland honoured his
achievements. The Times wrote: “It was Mr Hardie’s misfortune that he
inherited more than an average share of Scottish dourness. The spirit of
compromise played but a minor part in his activities. This negative much of his
work for the party for which he worked, while his imagination led him astray on
many vital points….`’
Maybe the press proprietors’
antipathy to him was unsurprising. He had little time for them. He moved a
private members’ bill in the Commons in 1901, which blamed poverty on private
ownership and called for “a Socialist Commonwealth founded upon the common
ownership of land and capital, production for use not for profit, and equality
of opportunity for every citizen.” “This House and British nation,” he said, “know
to their cost the danger which comes from allowing men to grow rich and
permitting them to use their wealth to corrupt the press, to silence the
pulpit, to degrade our national life, and to bring shame and reproach on a
great people in order that a few unscrupulous scoundrels might be able to add
to their ill-gotten gains.” That would be a powerful enough sentiment to
express today. I imagine it was even more unpalatable then.
This week we’ve had the strange
case of The Sun newspaper (along with
The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail
and The Daily Express, which all ran
the same story) falling silent after breaking a scoop story about Jeremy Corbyn
having been a Czechoslovakian spy in the 1980s. It proved groundless, but gave
Conservative politicians licence to attack the man they most fear. However the
newspapers have dropped the story – for the time being at least.
Meanwhile the Deputy Labour
leader, Tom Watson, in The Independent newspaper,
“argued the new attacks on Mr Corbyn fit a pattern going back decades, which
has also seen the same papers attack Ed Miliband’s father as ‘the man who hated
Britain’ and vilified Neil Kinnock.
“Mr Watson’s attack comes as Mr
Corbyn was forced to threaten legal action against Ben Bradley, an MP and a
vice chair of the Conservatives, who, after reading the newspaper
coverage, made claims on social media that the Labour leader had ‘sold British
secrets’ to communist spies.
“In his article, Mr Watson
writes: ‘Newspaper proprietors in this country abuse their power.
‘It’s a unique kind of self-harm
for a newspaper to print a story they know is poorly sourced, decide to run it
regardless because it suits their political agenda, and pass it off as news.’”
I suspect the same motivation
lies behind this dislike of Mr Corbyn as lay behind the attacks on Keir Hardie
over 100 years ago. He didn’t seek their favour or mince his words, unlike the
majority of those in power in recent times. And in the last two election
manifestoes Labour has committed to initiating Leveson Enquiry part 2, which
they fear would place them under legal obligations rather than their own rather
easy-going voluntary code. He is in their view a danger. What he certainly is
not is a traitor, as some Tories were stupidly saying, as Andrew Neil ably
demonstrated in his interview with Brexit minister, Steve Baker, on Wednesday
– which is one of the best pieces of interviewing I have seen. “Surely the real
scandal, Mr Baker, is not what Mr Corbyn has supposedly done, or not done; it’s
the outright lies and disinformation which your fellow Tories are spreading.
That’s the real scandal, isn’t it?” I
urge you to watch the four minutes of eye-opening viewing. And where it
started was with an under-researched malicious piece of journalism in one of
our tabloid newspapers.
