‘It’s nothing to do with Jeremy’

Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Hardie have too much in common for Carny's taste

More than 1,000 people are expected to pay to hear Jeremy Corbyn deliver a centenary lecture on Keir Hardie in Aberdare this weekend. In itself that tells us a good deal about the enduring influence of the founding leader of the Labour Party and also the amount of interest in his latest successor.

The two men share a lot in common. Labour’s historian Kenneth O. Morgan wrote of Keir Hardie, “More than any other of Labour’s founding fathers, he symbolises the idea of permanent opposition, of Labour as the party protest, the voice of outrage ... (he was) an agitator of genius, a socialist of a fundamentalist stamp.” Morgan goes on to say that many of his followers saw him as an incorruptible idealist, while his enemies treated him as a wild extremist.

Hardie was a republican who advocated abolition of the House of Lords. He was an ardent supporter of civil liberties and women’s rights, trade unionism and full employment. He opposed the Boer War and the First World War and would undoubtedly have opposed nuclear weapons. He supported Home Rule for Ireland and Scotland, but was more ambivalent about Wales, and decolonisation of the empire, especially India.

 Keir Hardie was essentially an outsider who played no part in any establishment. When he died in 1915 that he was described as “the leader who never won a strike, never organized a Union, governed a parish, or passed a Bill”. He was almost wholly ignorant of any element of economics. Socialism, he wrote, “is not a system of economics”.

And yet he is probably the most revered leader in Labour’s history. In 2008, at least, the Labour conference voted him its greatest hero. When he speaks this weekend we can be assured that Jeremy Corbyn will claim his inheritance as his own.

It is more than a little poignant therefore that at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno a few weeks ago, First Minister Carwyn Jones sought to distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn and the party in London. He said Welsh Labour had always formed its own policies. “It doesn’t matter who the leader is in London, that’s what we’ve always done. It’s nothing to do with Jeremy.”

Labour’s tactic on the doorstep in the forthcoming Assembly election would be to emphasise its candidates represented Welsh Labour, not the UK party. “It’s a Welsh election. This is Welsh Labour, which in terms of policy is autonomous. We develop our own policies, our own laws; there’s no influence from London at all.”

Does this mean that Carwyn Jones would also seek to distance himself from Keir Hardie’s inheritance? That can hardly be the case. After all, Hardie was Welsh Labour’s first MP, representing Merthyr and Aberdare from 1900 to 1915. Moreover, the values and causes he espoused go the heart of the socialist ideal that motivates Labour activists in Wales as much as anywhere else.

So what is the problem? Unquestionably its been the infighting and divisions amongst Labour at Westminster since Corbyn was elected last September. As Carwyn Jones put it, “I can’t pretend that all we’ve seen in the last few months in Westminster has been exactly helpful for the election in May.”