Ed Miliband vs Keir Hardie; Why Ed is NOT a true Labour Leader

Keir Hardie, one of Labour’s found members, was born in 1856, Scotland close to Motherwell. He had his first job when he was 7 years old, a message boy for the Anchor Line Steamship Company.

Ed Miliband was born in 1969 London. He is the youngest son of Ralph Miliband. His first job, or internship was 18/ 19 whilst working for family friend and Chesterfield MP Tony Benn.

Keir had to stop schooling at an early age, but his parents taught him to read and write in the evenings, and because of the Great Lockout of the Clydeside ship workers were sent home for six months, forcing Hardie’s father to go out to sea, and he got a job as a ‘trapper’ opening and closing doors so miners had sufficient oxygen, he was only 10.

Miliband attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford after gaining 4 A Levels, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He went on to graduate from London School of Economics with a MSc in Economics.

By the time Hardie was 20 he was a skilled miner, he also joined the Evangelical Union Church, his preaching to his fellow workers gave him the platform for public speaking, eventually his colleagues turning to him as the logical chairman and spokesman for their grievances. However this annoyed mine owners, and got him and his younger siblings blacklisted from working in the local mines.

In 1992, after graduating, Miliband, now 23, became a researcher for Channel 4’s programme A Week In Politics, eventually being poached by Harriet Harman, the then Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to become her speech writer.

During Hardie’s time as Union Leader, he became a journalist writing for the local newspaper the Cummock News, loyalist to the Liberal Party, which he evidentially joined.

He also started his own union in 1886 called the Ayrshire Miners Union, which he was Organising Secretary, earning just £75 per annum. 

Even though Hardie was blacklisted from the coal mines, he quickly moved over to the unions. During 1879 Hardie was appointed as Corresponding Secretary of the miners, three weeks after that he was chosen by the miners as their delegate at the National Conference of Mine. Later on the year Hardie was selected as National Secretary, and during the 1880 strike, Hardie had an on-going soup kitchen to feed the miners families, which his new wife was in charge of.

In 1994, the new Labour leader Tony Blair, moved Harriet Harman from the post of Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to Shadow Secretary of State for Employment, so Ed Miliband went to work for Gordon Brown who was Shadow Chancellor.

When Labour won their victory landslide win in 1997, Miliband was appointed special adviser to the Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Even though Hardie was a member of the Liberal Party, he started to realise they weren’t going to push through reforms that he thought were needed for the working class, and so in 1888 he stood to become an independent labour candidate. He didn’t win this seat, in fact he came last, but it seemed to push him on, and on the 25^th August 1888, the Scottish Labour Party was born, and Hardie was its first secretary.

Hardie won his first seat in 1892 West Ham South (Greater London), beating the Conservative candidate by 5,268 to 4,036.

When Hardie took his place in parliament, he refused to wear to proper attire, and the press accused him of wearing what the common working man wore - 'cloth cap in Parliament'.

Before Ed Miliband stood for a seat in Parliament, he took an unpaid year off, going Harvard for a year until 2003, when he went back to the the Treasury, until 2005 when Kevin Hughes, then MP for Doncaster North, resigned after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease, Milliband won the Labour safe seat of 12,656, over 50% of the vote.

It was in 2006 that Miliband was put in his very first Ministerial role after Tony Blair's cabinet re-shuffle, he was given Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office.

It was only in 2007, when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after Tony Blair's resignation, he got his first Cabinet role as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy Lancaster, meaning he and his brother, David Miliband, were the first siblings to serve in the British Cabinet since 1938 Edward and Oliver Stanley.

A year after Hardie won his first seat, he and others formed the Independent Labour Party (ILP), something that did frighten the Liberal Party. However Hardie lost his seat in 1895 when a fatal incident killed 251 miner in Pontypridd, he asked that there be a message of condolence to the victims' families in the birth of the future heir, which was refused, resulting in Hardie damning the Monarchy and causing an uprising in the House of Commons.

For the next five years Hardie worked hard at making the Labour movement, and it was in 1900 when Hardie had organised a meeting between various trade unions and other groups that the LRC (Labour Representation Comittee) was born, thus the beginnings of The Labour Party.

Ed Miliband was later promoted to Secretary of State under Brown's government in 2008, and in 2009, he attended a film premier of The Age of Stupid about climate change, where actor, Pete Postlethwaite, threatened to leave the Labour Party if Kingsnorth Coal-Fire Power Station went ahead. Later on Miliband announce that the plans had been scrapped.

He stayed in this role until Labour lost to a minority Conservative government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, in the general election of 2010.

In 1900 Hardie was elected as a junior MP for the dual-member constituency of Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare, South Wales, which he represented for the rest of his life. Labour was starting to grow, especially as the Conservatives were in a mess, and thought of as out of touch with the electorate, and Labour had the Liberal's worried, forcing them to form a pact with the Labour Party during the 1906 general election (known as the Lib-Lab pact). It was in 1908 that Hardie resigned as Labour leader, afterwards he spent his time campaigning for votes for women, to end the segregation in South Africa, and self rule for India.

During the First World War in 1914, which Hardie was completely against, he tried to set up an international general strike, but his motives weren't that popular, including within the Labour Party, but a year later died after suffering a number of strokes. He past away in Glasgow on 26th September 1915 aged 59.

2010 saw the beginning of the Labour Leadership contest in which Ed Miliband, his older brother David Miliband, bank bencher Diane Abbot, Andy Burnham, and Ed Balls all contest for the leadership, which was eventually won by Ed Miliband, with 175,519 (just over 50%) of the votes, mainly thanks to Ed's support from the trade unions. His brother David Miliband came in at a close second with 147,220.

Ed became the youngest Labour Leader ever, however his current popularity against the government isn't as high, as what was expected when first elected. While Tony Blair enjoyed a 29 point lead in opinion polls in 1995, two years before their victorious landslide, Ed Miliband only has a 5 point lead on the Tory lead government.

There's one massive factor dividing the two men; Miliband is a career politician and never done a hard days work in his life; Hardie knew first hand what the working classes as he was working class, and he wanted better conditions for his fellow man.

This is what let's down Labour's leadership nowadays, the haven't had a genuine working class leader for a long time, and maybe they need to find themselves one again.