ABSTRACT
Historians and biographers have laboured under a similar difficulty, and in no period of Keir Hardie’s life is it more acute than in the years between 1887 and 1892. His Parliamentary candidatures for Mid-Lanark in 1888 and West Ham South in 1892 exposed him to considerable press publicity, but between these dates we are obliged to follow him through sporadic newspaper reports of his work as secretary to the Scottish Labour Party. The party attracted only intermittent attention, as when a by-election or industrial dispute allowed it to win publicity. Hardie’s decision to form the new Labour party in Scotland was hastened by his growing disillusionment with the English miners’ leaders in Parliament during the crisis which overtook the Scottish miners in February 1887. Hardie had probably nurtured the ambition to succeed Alexander McDonald as the Scottish miners’ representative in Parliament from a very early stage.
