Keir Hardie Quotes

Nationalisation of land, mines, and railways was not necessarily of a definite Socialist character. In Germany they had nationalisation of railways, but it did not help the workers, and in India they had nationalisation of land, railways, and mines, and there was more poverty among the workers there than in any other country. They might have all these things nationalised for the advantage of capitalism and the condition of the workers the same as before. Unless they had the State controlled by the working class and abolished class rule they could nationalise what they pleased, but the worker would continue in a subordinate position.

Surely we had got beyond that stage of civilisation as represented by war and the age of barbarism. What was the deduction from Mr. Haldane's observations? That the mass of the people in the industrial army corresponded to the rank and file in the military Army were to have no opinions, no individuality, no will of their own, no right to think, and no power to act, that they were to be obedient and in subjection to those placed in power and authority over them. That kind of dogma might do for the military feudalism of Germany, but it was alien and contrary to the freedom-loving spirit of Scotland, which inspired the poems of Robert Burns.

There is the increasing tension required in the conduct of business which so saps a man's energies as to leave him little of either time or inclination for the cultivation of any other than the business faculty. A tendency to revolt against this is a well-marked feature of the social life of our time. Of what use is it, ask these slaves of the ledger, to spend the greater part of a lifetime in acquiring a competency only to find after it has been acquired that its acquisition has taken all the savour of enjoyment out of life?

As a matter of hard, dry fact, from which there can be no getting away, there is more Labour legislation standing to the credit account of the Conservative Party on the Statute Books than there is to that of their opponents. It is a grotesque assumption that one side exists for the purpose of passing such legislation while the other does so grudgingly and under the force of compulsion.

For 50 years they had had free trade in Great Britain and they had a greater mass of sordid, miserable destitution in this country than could be found in any other country on the face of the globe. If tariff reform would solve the question there would be no poverty in America, protection was never intended to benefit the working classes.

As a consequence of this the men on strike are believed by millions of people who know nothing of the facts to be wild, riotous, drunken, worthless scamps, whereas the very opposite is the truth. The military and police have been sent to help the masters to crush the men. The trick won’t succeed.

The Home Secretary not only defends the actions of the police and refuses an enquiry into the charges against them but also eulogises the hooligans in uniform, whilst Liberal MPs, with few exceptions, back him up by their votes in the Division Lobby.

If the State has no right to interfere to protect the poor struggling against circumstances over which they have no control in the industrial world, it is difficult to see why the same State should be considered a beneficent agency when called in to protect the property of the rich against an infuriated mob of starving people. If the poor are to be left to struggle for existence unaided by the State, then why not the rich?

The events of the past few weeks in the Aberdare and Rhondda valleys must have shown you anew that a Liberal government is first and foremost a capitalist government. If the bloodshed and riotous conduct of which the police have been guilty had taken place under a Conservative government every Liberal platform would have rung with denunciations of the wicked Tories; but, because it is the Liberals who are responsible there is a conspiracy of silence in the press and every Liberal speaker is dumb.

If it could be shown that the great Trust magnate or the great Aristocratic landowner, apart from the advantages of his inherited wealth, was a more highly developed species of humanity than the poor struggling sempstress or the unemployed docker, then there might be some justification for allowing the docker and the sempstress as the representatives of a weaker class to die out in order to enable the more highly developed creature to survive; but one moment's reflection will show that the alleged superiority of the landowner or the Trust magnate rests on one fact alone, namely, that he owns certain material possessions, usually inherited, which enable him to dictate the terms upon which his less fortunate fellow creatures shall be permitted to live.

The individualistic conception of the State as some external authority exercising a malign influence upon the life of the community is a travesty of fact. The State is that form of organised society which has evolved through the process of the ages, and represents the aptitude for freedom and self-government to which any people has attained. The policeman and the soldier, for example, who are at the call of the landlord or the employer when tenant or workman becomes turbulent, exist by the will and under the express authority of those same tenants and workmen, who constitute a preponderating majority in the State, and without whose consent neither soldier nor policeman could continue to exist.

Thanks to the wise legislators of the past who had allowed our native land to go out of cultivation and left us dependent upon other countries for our food supplies, all that an invading force would be required to do would be to stop our food supplies coming in; the gaunt enemy of hunger would do all the invader's work.

No law can give freedom to a people which is dependent upon some power or authority outside themselves for the necessaries of life. The owners of the means of life can dictate the terms upon which all who are not owners are to be permitted to live.

For my own part I have always maintained that to claim for the Socialist movement that it is a "class" war dependent for its success upon the "class" consciousness of one section of the community is doing Socialism an injustice, and indefinitely postponing its triumph. It is, in fact, lowering it to the level of a mere faction fight. Socialism offers a platform broad enough for all to stand upon who accept its principles ... Socialism makes war upon a system, not upon a class.

They of the Labour party were free-traders to a man.