Parallels in history over a century later are fraught with difficulties. However, there are some parallels with the imperialist aims of modern Russia in their invasion of Ukraine and the financing of their interests through the UK financial system.
 
In Keir Hardie's day, Russia was the great dictatorship, the apogee of feudal cruelty and imperial oppression. British socialists worked closely with Russian exiles, including many Jews escaping persecutions. Hardie was particularly friendly with the nihilist Sergius Stepniak and the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, both exiles in London. He strongly supported allowing refugees into the country escaping persecution in eastern Europe during the debate over the Aliens Bill of 1905. This was when right-wing politicians were busy exploiting racial prejudice in the east end of London and other cities.
 
The main business of the ILP Easter Conference in 1908 was to declare its opposition to the Russian government for its 'infamous tyranny' which 'condemned great numbers of our Russian comrades to imprisonment, torture, and death.’ If this sounds familiar to current events, it may well be because Vladimir Putin has a 19th-century imperialist view of Russia and a similar approach to dissidents. 
 
In arguably another analogous call, Hardie condemned an official visit to Russia by King Edward VII. Hardie protested in Parliament, accusing the King of going in order to render Russia safe for European capitalists to exploit. The root cause of the 1907 entente with Russia was the need to protect British investors in the Near East, as Russian troops invaded Persia. He accused the King of condoning Russian ‘atrocities’, referencing the shooting of political and industrial demonstrators. When the Tsar made a return visit, Hardie was one of the first to oppose the visit. In Parliament, he said the Tsar 'did not represent the people of Russia, and King Edward did not represent the people of Great Britain.’ The Tsar never left his ship at Cowes.
 
Hardie is also well known for his opposition to war. He was present at the 1904 Congress of the International when the Russo-Japanese war broke out, which opposed that conflict, as Hardie had done earlier over the Boer War. A war he argued as being for the profits of the few, mainly Rhodes. He argued that the working class should not ‘bow to the yoke of imperialism.' Hardie, the pacifist, believed socialism was 'revolutionary' but 'that it can only be won by violent outbreak is in no sense true.’ He also opposed the First World War, and he despaired as German and French socialists supported their respective governments. The Labour Party initially declared against the war, but it also bent to the war fever of the initial war period.
 
Even in his address to the anti-war meeting in Trafalgar Square on 2 August 1914, he had Russia in his sights, ‘We should not be in this position but for our alliance with Russia. Friends and comrades, this very square has rung with denunciations of Russian atrocities. Surely if there is one country under the sun which we ought to have no agreement with it is the foul government of anti-democratic Russia.’ Had he succeeded in uniting workers across Europe, millions of lives would have been saved.

Dave Watson
Secretary

​This week is the 200th anniversary of the Radical Rising or Radical War as it is also known. A less well-known part of Scotland’s working-class history, often overshadowed by events like the Peterloo Massacre, which took place the previous year.
 
The radical movement in Scotland was influenced by the American and French revolutions as well as tracts like Thomas Paine’s ‘The Rights of Man’. Increasing literacy in Scotland, thanks to the education system, brought these ideas to a wider audience. Scotland had eight newspapers in 1782, and that had grown to twenty-seven by 1790.
 
There was also a nationalist element brought about by disaffection with the Treaty of Union - exacerbated by measures including Scotland being described officially as ‘North Britain’ and the abolition of the office of Secretary of State for Scotland. The Burns song ‘A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’ sums up this view.  
 
The uprisings in Ireland had a limited synergy in Scotland with envoys from the United Irishmen attending a convention in Edinburgh in 1793. The Scottish ‘Friends of the People’ planned an uprising, but its leaders Watt and Downie were arrested. Watt was executed, and Downie was transported. A new republican organisation was formed after this based around secret United Scotsmen societies. Plans for an uprising died away after the Government’s success in Ireland.
 
While republican uprisings may have had limited support, there was a big growth in radicalism. The end of the Napoleonic wars brought economic depression. From 1760 to 1813 wages rose by 60% while the cost of living rose by 130%. Labourers were deprived of their smallholdings, and common land was enclosed. The profits from industrialisation went into the pockets of employers while the price of wheat trebled in less than 20 years.
 
Radical organisation was based on weavers’ union societies based in most villages, until broken by the Government in 1812. After the employers refused to abide by a court decision on wage levels, 20,000 weavers went on strike. It was eventually broken in February 1813, having lasted nine weeks.
 
By 1819 the radical movement had continued to grow along with the wider British movement. The Paisley Radical Committee was the strongest in the country with some 30,000 people attending a rally on Meikleriggs Muir on July 17 1819 – a month before Peterloo. After that military style drilling took place most evenings and the CinC of the army sought to strengthen security at Yeomanry depots. A Peterloo protest meeting on September 11 in Paisley, attracted 14-18,000 people from across Ayrshire, Renfrewshire and Glasgow. These were followed by riots and meetings across the central belt, and the military was called in to suppress them.
 
The Government was convinced a large-scale uprising was planned by the 28-man Committee for Organising a Provisional Government, formed to coordinate the Radical Committees. They paid agents to infiltrate the movement, and most of the committee were arrested following a meeting in Glasgow on March 21 1820. These informers then turned agent-provocateurs by announcing that a rising was imminent and helped organise the collection of weapons.
 
They also organised the printing and distribution of a proclamation on April 1. It called for a rising, "To show the world that we are not that lawless, sanguinary rabble which our oppressors would persuade the higher circles we are but a brave and generous people determined to be free”. The English references to Magna Carta probably point to it being written by a government spy.
 
Some 60,000, mainly weavers, downed tools on April 3. A few badly organised risings were provoked by government agents including the march on the Carron Ironworks and in Strathaven. The aim was to flush out the radical leadership while large numbers of troops were billeted in the central belt. In Greenock, rioters freed prisoners from the local jail.
 
Hundreds of radicals fled by ship to Canada to escape persecution, while 88 men were charged with treason. A number were acquitted, but James Wilson was hanged and beheaded in Glasgow on August 30, and a similar fate befell Andrew Hardie and John Baird in Stirling on September 8. Nineteen more were transported, although subsequently pardoned in 1835.
 

The 1820 Society seeks to publicise and commemorate the Scottish Radical Insurrection of 1820. It carries out its commemorative function by holding rallies at the three 1820 Monuments.
 
There was a debate in the Scottish Parliament on 5 September 2001 (motion S1M-2101) on the subject of 1820 and the education curriculum. It would be fair to say that politicians of all parties picked their own lessons from the uprisings in the debate, but it at least highlighted the event.   
 
The 1820 insurrection may not have been an immediate success, but it did reflect a much wider radical feeling in Scotland and Britain during the period. It also forms part of the radical tradition that did eventually lead to political reform. Albeit using different tactics.
 
The family of Keir Hardie liked to speculate on their kinship to Andrew Hardie, something Keir Hardie did not discourage despite it being his adopted name. When asked about this, his daughter Nan said simply ‘my father …. had some queer notions.’
 
 
Further Reading:
The Radical Rising: The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 by Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a’Ghobhainn. Originally published in 1970, the 2016 paperback is in print. The authors arguably put something of a nationalist spin on events, but it is well researched and remains the best study of the insurrection.

Most people will be familiar with the Great Famine or Great Hunger, a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1849. Outside Ireland, it is often referred to as the Irish Potato Famine. Less well known is that the potato blight also affected many parts of Scotland during the same period, leading to protests and riots. These are documented in James Hunter’s new book, ‘Insurrection: Scotland’s Famine Winter’. 

​Some of the most violent riots took place in the North East of Scotland, Inverness and Caithness. The Western Isles were also badly hit by the famine and this led to a further stage of the land clearances and migration to North America. Absentee landlords, some of which invested their generous slave compensation payments in Highland and Aberdeenshire land, promoted migration. 
 
For example, John Gordon of Cluny sent nearly 1,700 people to Canada. ‘These parties,’ a senior immigration officer noted of people reaching Quebec from Gordon’s estate, ‘presented every appearance of poverty and . . . were without the means . . . of procuring a day’s subsistence for their helpless families on landing.’
 
The insurrections were eventually put down by the military, although this took some time as there were few soldiers stationed in Scotland. At the outset, only 240 in Aberdeen and 55 at Fort George. There were no railways in the north of Scotland at this time, and only one Royal Navy gunboat available to transport troops. Law and order was enforced by a handful of constables and specials enrolled from the ‘reliable’ middle classes. However, many of these were sympathetic to the rioters and were in any case overwhelmed by the numbers involved.
 
The courts handed down punitive transportation sentences, in actions reminiscence of the Tolpuddle Martyrs case. As the Manchester Times noted “the men who supported the . . . exclusion are in high office and honour, and the poor young fellow who obstructed the exportation of a boatload of corn, when his neighbours had the horrors of starvation before their eyes, is sentenced to ten years transportation.”
 
The famine also raised political consciousness. The Whig MP for Caithness, who was in the pocket of the local landowner, complained,  “They are great readers and their local press is of the worst description, tending . . . to preach socialism and its accompanying doctrines.”
 
The Chartists were also active in the areas affected. The authorities in Inverness made strenuous efforts in 1839 to deny venues for Chartist meetings organised by the Aberdeen Chartist, Alexander MacKenzie. He had similar problems in Macduff and Elgin. Hunter also notes the prevalence of shoemakers in radical activity, something which had been a feature of continental revolutionary activity. 
 
Some historians have argued that there was no organised activity behind the riots. However, Hunter points out that while riot and disturbance was endemic in these communities, theft was not. Many of the actions were also well organised, such as in Inverness in 1847 when roadblocks were established around the town. Although there is limited evidence of wider political goals other than the relief of famine.
 
The authorities were forced to respond with food supplies and the sentences were reduced. Not welcomed by The Scotsman newspaper, which reverted to its long-standing conviction that crofters, said to be ‘men who love to live without without work’, needed to be ‘disabused’ of any notion that they might be deserving of help from outside.
 
The later extension of the franchise brought radical Highland land reform (HLLRA) candidates into the 1885 election including Gavin Clarke as the MP for Caithness. As a student, he joined the International Working Men’s Association, regarded Karl Marx as a guiding light, and was for some time on good terms with our very own James Keir Hardie.
 
As Hunter says in the concluding chapter, “Might there have been among the Bridge Street crowd, on the day when Gavin Clark became MP for Caithness, at least one or two people – in their fifties or sixties now – who were in that same street, on an equally snowy day in February 1847, when the Riot Act was read and a harbour-bound grain cart brought forcibly to a halt?”
 
There is a lot of detail in this book about the impact of the famine on Scotland, and pretty harrowing it is. It also highlights the establishment attitudes of the day and some nascent political responses. In all, a very worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the period and the insurrection that the famine provoked.
 
 
Dave Watson
January 2020
 
Ps. The book is half price at Waterstones in Glasgow at present.

I have been in South Africa this week. Keir Hardie’s visit to India is reasonably well known, but he also stopped off in South Africa on his way home.
 
You might have thought that the Boers would have welcomed him given he championed their cause during the Boer War. Unlike the Fabians, who supported the war, he saw it as a capitalists’ war. He admittedly had a rather romantic view of the Boer way of life, but he was proved right about the economic damage and the impact of militarism.
 
However, while Hardie opposed imperialism, he also had a distinct class position that included race. He argued that the fundamental problems of Indian workers or black African miners were the same as the poor of Lanarkshire, Ayrshire or South Wales. They both suffered appalling living conditions, while the landowners and the bosses exploited them. 
 
He suggested that trade unions open themselves to blacks and share farmland. He championed the democratic rights of the majority and supported tribal lands, operating under their laws. Not a policy that was going to be popular in racist South Africa. Of course, Keir Hardie was never one to duck an unpopular cause!
 
His meetings in Durban, Johannesburg and Ladysmith were all physically attacked. He narrowly escaped with his life from the Johannesburg venue. As Keir Hardie put it:
 
“It will scarcely be credited by those not on the spot, but this produced as much sensation as though I had proposed to cut the throat of every white man in South Africa. The capitalist Press simply howled with rage – there were, of course, exceptions – and at Ladysmith a mob, led by a local lawyer, wrecked the windows of the hotel in which I was staying.”
 
I visited Ladysmith, but sadly I suspect the hotel he spoke at is no more in a modern main street - although the town hall and the siege museum are from that period.
 
Jonathan Hyslop puts Hardie’s position in context and explains the challenges it created for Labour supporters in South Africa.
 
“Labourites in the white settlement colonies wanted to defend Hardie, as a representative figure of British labour, but were embarrassed by the fact that Hardie’s position on India went against the grain of White Labourist ideology. In southern Africa, local leaders of British labour did opt to defend Hardie. But they did so not only at the risk of alienating their members, but also at the price of being forced into direct confrontations with anti-Hardie groupings.”
 
He also explains the basis for Hardie’s position and, to contemporary ears, the language he sometimes used: “He was a man of his time, seeking democratization of the Empire rather than its end, and his sympathy with the oppressed could coexist with constructs derived from contemporary racial ideology.”

He ended his tour in Cape Town. Here he was better received as some Cape unions had opened their membership. There was an election, and The Labour Party was concerned that he might damage their campaign. However, The Social Democratic Federation organised a series of well supported and undisrupted meetings.

Active hostility to Hardie in South Africa came mainly from middle- and upper-class British immigrants. British shopkeepers, members of volunteer colonial regiments, and supporters of pro-capitalist political groups. Many Afrikaners remembered his support during the Boer War.
​
British working-class political activists were generally unsympathetic to the grievances of the Indians. Remember, this was where Gandhi cut his political teeth organising coal miner strikes and campaigning against punitive taxes on indentured workers. However, their allegiance to the British trade union tradition and their admiration for the Labour Party in the United Kingdom meant that they had great personal respect for Hardie.

Dave Watson
Secretary
​Keir Hardie Society

Picture from Martin Plaut

The years running up to the First World War were marked with many industrial disputes as workers joined trade unions in huge numbers to challenge falling real wages and working conditions. Keir Hardie was unsurprisingly to be found supporting workers in struggle across the UK.

The government decided on a number of occasions to deploy troops in support of the police.  This was attacked by trade unions as an abuse of state power in support of the bosses and speakers at union rallies often called upon working class soldiers to disobey orders. 

In the National Archives I found a 1912 Home Office file full of complaints from 'concerned citizens' about this, asking why the authorities are not charging the trade union leaders with sedition or similar offences.

One such complaint covered a meeting in Bristol at which Keir Hardie spoke. He said:

"I only know of two classes of people who can command police and military escort - one the blackleg and the other the Royal family. So far as I can make out, in the eyes of the powers that be, the one is regarded as important as the other. And I dare say that if the capitalist class were called upon to decide whether they would abolish the Royal family or the blackleg they would decide for the latter without hesitation." 

 Another speaker said:

"It is not the function of the soldier, maybe your son or brother, to be called out to shoot those who are simply fighting for right and a bit more bread and cheese."

One concerned citizen residing at, The Manor House, Othery, Bridgewater, enclosed a copy of the newspaper article in his complaint to the Home Secretary. The letter is on file and is reproduced below.

The civil servant who considered the matter was clearly outraged by the speeches. "The language is well calculated, not only to cause discontent and disaffection amongst H.M. subjects and promote feelings of ill will and hostility between different classes."

I somehow doubt Keir Hardie would have disagreed with that!

Sadly for 'outraged of Bridgewater', the civil servant had to conclude that it wasn't a case that called for criminal proceedings. Pity really, I am sure Keir Hardie would have enjoyed defending himself at that trial. 

Dave Watson
9 August 2019