No doubt freshly spinning in his grave over the Labour Party leadership purge and debacle, James Keir Hardie and his legacy is to be discussed at a special centenary conference being held at Salford's Working Class Movement Library on 26th September.
Keir Hardie, as historian and conference speaker Kenneth O Morgan remarks, was "Labour's greatest pioneer and its greatest hero...This extraordinary man rose from the pits of Ayrshire to change the world...".
Keir Hardie was working down the pits twelve hours a day at age eleven but educated himself to become a miners' trade union leader while advocating a new Labour Party to represent working people. A friend of Friedrich Engels and the Pankhursts, he became the first socialist Independent Labour MP in 1892 and helped form and lead the Independent Labour Party, which became the Labour Party.
Advocating socialist policies like higher taxes for the rich, free schooling, pensions and reform of Parliament, he battled with fellow MPs over women's rights and the First World War, became disillusioned with the way the Party was heading and died age 59, a "broken man" in the words of one of his friends.
There'll be plenty to discuss around Keir Hardie's legacy at the centenary conference, with the current Labour Party at war over its direction. There will be a keynote address on `Remembering Keir Hardie' by David Howell from the University of York; followed by papers on `Hardie and Wales', `Hardie and Ireland', 'Hardie, Carlyle and the Hero' and 'Hardie and the Great Unrest: Struggles, Strikes, and Internationalism'...
Organised by the Working Class Movement Library and De Montfort University, Leicester, the conference is sponsored and supported by the North West Labour History Society, the Society for the Study of Labour History and the Keir Hardie Society.
Keir Hardie Centenary Conference
Saturday 26th September
Working Class Movement Library
Tickets £20/£7.50 (unwaged) including lunch. Places must be reserved and paid for in advance; email trustees@wcml.org.uk
For the full line up click here
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
(3).jpeg)
.png)
(1).JPG)
