Class heroes

Leo Abse

The General Strike Patrick Renshaw (Eyre Methuen £9.75) Kier Hardie Kenneth 0. Morgan (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £8.00) When the Churchill commemorative fund was established, the local council in my Constituency refused to contribute a single penny: all the paeons of praise bestowed upon the war leader found no echo in my Welsh Valley. The grandfathers accused him of having sent in the Hussars to patrol the coal field after the police brutality of the Tonypandy riots of 1910: and the fathers reopened the wounds they had received at his hands during the General Strike. Neither death nor the reparative acts of the national hero in the war against Nazism mitigated their hatred: for them he was the class warrior and the more contemporary was their life span with his, the more bitterly did they revile him.

The response of my older constituents was not paranoia inflamed by working class mythology. Patrick Renshaw, in his detached and crisp account of the General Strike, written with the benefit of the newly available official records and Cabinet papers, confirms Churchill's persistently provocative role. As some men need friends, so Churchill needed enemies; when he could not find them abroad, he discovered them among his fellow countrymen. The miners, paid a pittance and entombed in the unsafe rat-holes of moronic mine owners, became his victims: they had as much courage as he possessed. If it were otherwise perhaps they would have suffered less, for Churchill could show some charity to the vanquished but never to the defiant.

Some six years before the General Strike, called to support the miners in their attempts to ward off reductions in their miserable wages,

Churchill was already working out a Strike Bill which would, as he put it, contain -a form of

words which would allow us to pick and choose the people we arrested." He was among the most determined to hand back the mines, under State supervision during the 1914-18 war, to the owners: and he helped to sabotage every scheme presented to temper the consequences to the miners of such a hand-over. Most of these schemes of compromise came from Jews within the Establishment, from Herbert Samuel, Alfred Mond and Reading: they sprang from a surviving people with a habit of mind that evaded confrontations and sought compromise and negotiation. But Churchill would have no truck with their sophisticated plans to nationalise mining royalties or provide schemes for selected subsidies to mines based upon profitability. The miners were part of his demonology, and Churchill could not feel safe until he had beaten them to their knees.

Keynes had warned Churchill of the consequences of his action, as ChancelIir of the Exchequer, in bringing Britain on to the gold standard. Exports would dip and wages would be forced down. On no single industry more than the coal industry would the consequences of Churchill's folly fall, for the miners' wages constituted two-thirds of the cost of production; and nowhere more would the burden be felt than in the export coalfields like South Wales. Yet, unabashed that his economic extravagances had so contributed to the problems of the industry, still, when the crunch was approaching, Churchill thwarted every pacific solution. Indeed his only fear was that peace would break out: when negotiations were developing between the Government and the TUC he deliberately acted as a provocateur, visited the Daily Mail editor and incited him to write an inflammatory editorial, well knowing the printers would refuse to set it up. The hawks in the Cabinet seized their opportunity, declared the nation was not facing an industrial dispute but a challenge to the Constitution and freedom of the press. Negotiations were broken off, and the General Strike begun. Churchill divided the nation in 1926 as surely as he united it in 1940.

When battle against his fellow countrymen commenced, his zest knew no decent con straints: he issued his notorious order to the troops guaranteeing immunity for any action they took. It may not have frightened the strikers but this incitement to violence cer tainly alarmed George V who was outraged by his intemperance. And then Churchill, spur iously fighting for the freedom of the press, as editor of the Government sponsored Gazette, debased every reputable tenet of democratic journalism by recklessly suppressing and distorting the news as part of his propaganda campaign.

When Tom Jones, the deputy secretary of the Cabinet desperately sought to float a consensus solution, Churchill erupted into "a cataract of boiling eloquence impossible to reproduce." He told the hapless Jones "We are at war." As in his later war, he won: but in both his battles, one as unworthy as the other was worthy, he lost the peace. The later peace he lost first, in the election of 1945: the earlier peace he posthumously lost in the miners wages settlement of 1972. But now, as we listen to the

gibberish of Scargill, scorning restraint and the social contract, we know N.N, are all losing. It is almost half a century since Churchill thrust the miner out of the family of the nation: but early rejection and trauma can leave a lasting impress, and now, helplessly, we all face the delinquent revenge.

Yet, in other seasons as a new invigorating biography, Kier Hardie, reveals, out of the mines, miraculously, come men who triumphed over their terrible early circumstance. At ten years of age Kier Hardie was already down the pit, experiencing all the terrors of life underground, the rockfalls and explosions that killed without warning. The lad was a trapper, paid one shilling a day with the responsibility of tending the trap that ventilated the mine, and on at least one occasion the boy with whom he was working was killed: the Labour movement, and Britain, were fortunate that Hardie was the survivor.

For this young pit worker was no ordinary miner: perhaps there were some other colliers who, like him, in the darkness of the mine, learned Pitman's shorthand, picking out the characters on a blackened slate with the wire used by miners to adjust the wicker of their lamps, and then, after long hours at work, hastening to night class to be dazzled by the works of Carlyle and Ruskin. And, no doubt, others too learned from the miners' world with its private close-knit loyalties, the reality of community and class and applied their hard learned lesson to politics. But no one so certainly belonged to the workers' world and yet remained so basically detached from it. Hardie's strength and his uniqueness was that he spurned the compact majority in and out of the Labour movement: and so he was possessed of fresh idiosyncratic thinking, forever bewildering those desperate to label him as a stereotype. Kennth Morgan rightly emphasises that the man destined to be labour's first MP and first leader of the Parliamentary Party was fundamentally estranged, throughout his• whole political life, from his own movement and from the House of Commons. He was the great outsider.

It began of course in the beginning: Hardie was born a bastard of an unknown father. He belonged, and did not belong, to the family his mother later created with his drunken step-father. That early situation was replicated in his membership of the Labour family. Like Merlin, Moses and Christ, and all denied a mere human father, he believed in magic and believed in his power to practice it. His seances were absurd and his messianic identifications stopped just this side of reality: but the magic gave him his charisma and he enchanted working class audiences as no labour leader ever will again. More comforting, in these days of disillusion, Morgan corroborates that Hardie is indeed a worthy hero for the Labour Party. For his alienation gave him freedom from the collective dogmas held by the sects that had to be welded together if an independent social democratic political movement was to emerge. He subtly distanced himself and, ultimately, the Labour Party, from Syndicalism, Populism and effete Lib-Lab groupings. Always feeling himself an outsider he had a natural empathy with those who were treated as outside the human race: his visits to India and Africa and his courageous instruction to the Labour movement to battle for the freedom of the subject peoples, as his fight for the suffragettes, were splendid forays infuriating many of his Labour colleagues who proved to be authentic and male chauvinist pigs. And what matter that this elemental man, poet and pragmatist, should have no less passionately embraced Sylvia Pankhurst than he embraced her feminist creed.

In the end heroes, to enter mythology, must be crucified, and Kier Hardie's constituents enthusiastically obliged. They killed him off for

his pacifist attempts in 1914 to stop their sons being sent to Armageddon. But worthy Labour

politicians will not be deterred by his fate. In the Conservative Clubs, beside the portrait of the Queen, the coloured photographs of Churchill are hanging: in my shabby Trades and Labour Council hall, as in so rhan.Y throughout the country, hangs the fading sepia photograph of Hardie. I am so glad that when I was young I chose the right hero.

Leo Abse is Labour MP for Pontypool