“GIVEN a strong lead, the Welsh people will place themselves in the van of the socialist movement. Kindly disposed by nature, genial in their relationships one to the other, living justice, and hating oppression, they can easily be roused up to battle.”

Today marks the anniversary of Keir Hardie’s birth which always presents an opportunity to consider his role in the development of socialist politics and working-class representation and consider any lessons that are still relevant today.

The words above were his comments, in his paper the Labour Leader, following his 10-day tour of the South Wales coalfield during the great coal strike of 1898, 125 years ago this summer.

The strike was a fight over the sliding scale payment system which caused significant hardship, and the miners demanded it be ended.

The coal strike of 1898 was a seminal moment for the industrial and political organisation of the working class in South Wales and, ultimately, for Britain as a whole. It resulted in a reappraisal and reorganisation of the miners’ trade unions. And it saw the rise of Hardie’s Independent Labour Party in South Wales, as it organised among the striking miners, at the expense of the Liberal Party.

It demonstrated that socialists who committed themselves to organising in support of a mass working-class pay campaign could win themselves the trust which could carry them through into political power.

The strike took place two years before Hardie’s election to Parliament for Merthyr Boroughs and his regular visits to the coalfield built his lasting relationship that would be rewarded in the 1900 election.

The conditions in which that leap forward for the movement took place, during the six months long all-out strike by nearly 100,000 miners, were real hardship for those miners and their family members.

The Welsh miners received donations — including from miners’ union organisations in England and Scotland — to fund strike pay, whilst a separate fund supported soup kitchens, including for miners’ children.

Hardie told readers of the Labour Leader that “the soup kitchens in some districts are in danger of being closed for lack of funds. I renew my appeal of two weeks ago to readers of The Labour Leader to exert themselves in this holy war.”

But he didn’t simply comment in his paper. Directly into that strike, Hardie arrived in July 1898, when he undertook a 10-day tour of local mining communities, to demonstrate his support for the miners — and to agitate discussion around the issues of future industrial and political organisation.

His tour was a roll-call of the coalfield, visiting Pentre, Porth and Ferndale, Pontypridd, Aberdare and Mountain Ash, Merthyr, Troedyrhiwand Treharris, and Abertillery — reportedly addressing as many as 15 mass meetings. There were reports of 1,000 at the Aberdare meeting and 5,000 at Troedyrhiw.

But alongside the material help, Hardie urged the miners to organise themselves better. They went into the strike in seven or eight localised mining unions. At Merthyr, he said, “the weakness of the labour movement was division.” At Porth, he said, “the sooner they were nationally united the better for them all.”

Writing in the Labour Leader in September, when the strike was lost, he urged the formation of a South Wales-wide miners’ union federation which should then affiliate to the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. The first step on this path was the establishment of a South Wales Miners’ Association at a meeting in Cardiff, on October 24 that year.

At the mass meetings and in his articles, he condemned the Liberal Party for failing to fight for the miners, including Rhondda’s Liberal MP William Abraham (known as Mabon), for being praised in the London press as “moderate.”

Commenting, Hardie said: “Have the actions of the employers been ‘moderate’? While the gaunt spectres of starvation, death and ruin stand at the door of every miner’s hovel, how dare their representative be what is termed moderate.”  

His attack on the failure of Liberal MPs to stand up for the miners was down to their own financial interests, when he said: “Another reason why Welsh members should be so milk and watery, was that if Parliament were to legislate in the interests of the working classes it would be at the expense of the men who were in Parliament.”

And just two years before his election to Parliament, he said the workers of Merthyr should ensure one of their MPs stood up for the working class.

“At present, the Merthyr boroughs sent two members to Parliament... One of these members should be selected from the working classes to represent the working classes, and that was what the Labour Party would endeavour to help them to do at the next election.”

The ILP had sent a full-time organiser into South Wales as the dispute started and reported in the party paper that, “At the beginning of the strike there were but five or six branches, now there are 31, some of them with a membership of 300.”

They met at a conference in Pontypridd in September to cement their organisation and build the movement to give political representation to the unions.

In the months and years that followed his election, Labour candidates would begin to secure places on local urban district councils, ultimately cementing Labour’s dominance in Welsh politics.

Today we face a different economic situation, but there are still valuable lessons from Hardie. Coal mining has largely gone but the cost-of-living crisis is real, enforced for those in the public sector by a Conservative government that has enforced a long-term decline in the value of public-sector pay. And as many resorted to soup kitchens 125 years ago, today many have to use foodbanks.

So what they need today, as the people of Wales did in 1898, is — yes, practical support — donations, fundraising, community organising, but more than anything they need fighting trade unions and socialists who will organise for them, and, where elected, speak up for them.

Just as then, the role of Labour MPs is not to stand aside as Westminster demands, and act in moderation while people suffer. The role of Labour MPs today is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those seeking a better standard of living when others withhold it, to win their trust — and their votes — and deliver the transformation of our society that people so urgently need.

As Hardie wrote in September that year: “Socialism offers the only hope for the Welsh miners, and whilst he is organising trade unions for protection against the existing industrial system, he should at the same time be organising his political power for the overthrow of the system which makes trade unions necessary.”

Beth Winter is Labour MP for Cynon Valley. Twitter —
@BethWinterMP.