The Saint of Glasgow

A former academic ">described as “The Saint of Glasgow” has attacked Prime Minister Gordon Brown for forgetting the Christian roots of socialism.Bob Holman, a former social policy professor with Bath University, famously gave up a comfortable middle-class life of academia to live in Easterhouse, one of Glasgow’s most deprived communities, where he spent almost 25 years following his religious convictions and working among the poor.

Holman, who has just published a book on Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the Labour Party, insists New Labour has forgotten the values which were once the bedrock of the party.
“If Hardie was alive today he would be very critical of Blair and would be publicly critical of him because here’s a man who has got enormous numbers of properties while others are homeless, and gets £15 million a year. Hardie would definitely say that that was inconsistent with Christianity.”

He also believes the party’s working-class roots have been neglected by Mr Brown and Mr Blair, and that there is an increasing number of career politicians who have been educated at elite schools and Oxbridge. A report published in January by the Speakers’ Conference on Parliamentary Representation found the number of working-class MPs had decreased sharply.
Mr Holman added: “There are now career politicians who go to university and then work for a party as a researcher or for a think-tank and then get the ear of politicians and are then parachuted into a seat.If you look at the Labour Cabinet, it’s predominately made up of people who come from the less than 1% of the population who went to Oxbridge or posh schools. It’s a reversal of what Hardie wanted and thought, because he wanted people in Parliament who knew about life at the bottom. Nowadays that doesn’t seem to happen.”

SOYMB , I am afraid do now have any dewy eyed nostalgia for old Labour or the politics and beliefs of Keir Hardie. A 1961 Socialist Standard article can be read here

Time after time Hardie fed workers the lie that they were part of a "nation " and as such were bound up in the quarrels of their masters. Not "International Working Class Solidarity", but "Class Collaboration" was his rallying cry, for Hardie was a patriot and proud of it. "I am not a pro-German". he wrote, "and still less am I a pro-Russian. I am a pro-Briton, loving my country and caring for her people. Any war of aggression against the rights and liberties of my country I would resist to the last drop of blood in my veins."

Hardie's Christian values , indeed !