Mid Lanark by-election 27 April 1888

​Politics during the nineteenth century was largely a hobby for the wealthy. Sons waiting to enter the House of Lords at the death of their fathers could spend time in the House of Commons. It was very much a gentlemen’s club which met around the other annual activities of the landed gentry. It would often not meet at all between the summer and January. 
MPs were not paid, so it was necessary to have an income from another source. Laws on bribery and corruption were ineffective, particularly in rural areas, where the landlord and the MP could be one and the same person.
During the nineteenth century, more working-class men were able to vote. But the widening of the franchise didn’t result in a widening of political choice. As Gilbert and Sullivan put it in Iolanthe in 1882:

I often think it’s comical, 
How Nature always does contrive 
That every boy and every gal 
That’s born into the world alive 
Is either a little Liberal 
Or else a little Conservative!

The Labour Representation League, formed in 1869 by John Stuart Mill with the support of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), tried to change this, but it made little progress and was subsumed into the Liberal Party. Meanwhile, under Gladstone’s leadership, a split occurred between the Whigs, who opposed any challenge to their control of the party and strongly objected to having working-class Members of Parliament, and those who thought they could incorporate a small number of TUC-supported candidates, as long as they were carefully chosen. 
The Liberal Party continued to benefit from working men’s votes, but in the 1880 election, only three candidates could be said to represent their needs, and even that was questionable. Henry Broadhurst was Secretary of the TUC, but he was far from radical. Indeed, he spent much of his time battling with Keir Hardie and others over issues such as the importance of the eight-hour day, a key demand of the workers’ movement, and whether there was any need for independent labour representation. 
In 1887, Keir Hardie attended his first TUC Congress. In his debut speech, he attacked Henry Broadhurst MP on the grounds that he had supported a Liberal candidate who employed sweated labour. This lone intervention by Hardie was his earliest salvo in a campaign for working-class representation that eventually resulted in the formation of the Labour Party. 
Keir Hardie was a socialist and a member of the Liberal Party. He wanted to test the Liberal Party’s commitment to make space for working-class candidates. Mid-Lanark seemed particularly auspicious as it had a sizable working-class electorate and Hardie was born in Lanarkshire and had worked as a miner and trade union organiser there. He also had the support of local Liberal Party members. The Liberal member for North West Lanarkshire was Robert Cunninghame Graham, considered to be the first socialist in Parliament. He encouraged Hardie to run for the seat. 
Hardie applied to the Mid Lanark Liberal Association describing himself as ‘a Radical of a somewhat advanced type’. His address to the miners of Mid-Lanark claimed that a vote for Hardie would be ‘a vote for Gladstone, Parnell and you’. The TUC had recently established the Labour Electoral Association, which committed £400 towards Hardie’s campaign.
The support of local members, however, was not enough. He needed the support of the Liberal Association, but it decided to select an English candidate with no local connections, from one of the elite Liberal families based in Wiltshire. It is probable that Cunninghame Graham and Hardie had anticipated rejection and already had plans for launching an Independent Labour Party, so that if Hardie was not selected for the Liberal Party, he would stand as a Labour candidate. 
Hardie had been assured by his supporters that he could count on the 3,500 Irish votes. With that and the backing of important trade union figures such as Tom Mann from Manchester, he could win the seat. 
His campaign poster tried to appeal to all his target voters. It listed: Home Rule, democratic government, justice to labour, no monopoly, no landlordism, temperance reform, healthy homes, fair rents, the eight-hour day and work for the unemployed. 
The London leadership of the Liberal Party had real concerns that Hardie’s support among Liberal voters would split their vote, so they offered him a safe seat at the next general election with a salary of £300 a year if he would step down in Mid-Lanark. When he turned this down, the Labour Electoral Association withdrew its earlier commitment to financial support.
He then lost the backing of the Irish voters as Parnell and the Irish National League encouraged support for the Liberal candidate as the best means of keeping influence with Gladstone. An article in the Glasgow Catholic Observer said that ‘Home Rule had to come first before the interests of the workmen’. 
Hardie had hoped to receive strong support from land reform campaigners, but he had never involved himself with either land reform or the crofters’ movement as all his efforts had been in industrial trade union organisation. 
Furthermore, some trade unionists were concerned about where Hardie’s funding was coming from; he was damaged by consistent rumours that he was receiving money from the Tories. His appointment of Tom Mann as his campaign manager, rather than help his prestige, upset local socialists who did not think it was necessary to bring in someone from England. The high hopes with which he started evaporated as the campaign progressed. 
After the result was declared, he celebrated the support of the ‘gallant 600’ who had voted for him. He must have been disappointed that he could not win in such ideal conditions. As it turned out, it was to be the one and only time he fought a seat in Scotland.
In the immediate aftermath of the by election, Hardie and Cunninghame Graham formed the Scottish Labour Party and Hardie went on to help found the Independent Labour Party, a British-wide movement in 1893. He continued to campaign for the TUC to back a labour party and was eventually successful in 1900 with the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party, which was founded in 1906.
Although he lost in Mid-Lanark, he was making a name for himself elsewhere and was selected as a candidate in the London seat West Ham South, which he won in 1892. He lost the seat at the following election and described his time in the House of Commons ‘as a place which I remember with a haunting horror’. In 1900, however, he was elected in Merthyr Tydfil, which he held until his death in 1915. 
Hardie was greatly admired by leading socialists including James Connolly, Jean Jaurès, Eugene Debs, Eleanor Marx, Friedrich Engels and Sylvia Pankhurst. He was loved by working men, women and children. He was the first leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but his main role was as an agitator. He died in 1915, aged fifty-nine, worn out by decades of campaigning and opposition to the First World War.
The successful candidate, John Wynford Philipps, was the eldest son of a baronet. He served as the MP for Mid-Lanark for six years before resigning and later becoming the MP for Pembrokeshire in Wales, which was something of a family seat. Ironically, this made him a Welsh MP at the same time as Keir Hardie was MP for Merthyr Tydfil. 
For a while at least, Westminster housed both the victor and defeated candidates from the 1888 Mid-Lanark by-election, one representing the entrenched privilege of the British class system and the other committed to its demise. Only one of these names is remembered, that of Keir Hardie.

​Pauline Bryan