ABSTRACT
The Labour party did not emerge smoothly, still less inevitably, from the growth of an integrated working class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Skilled workers often looked down on the less skilled, believing that the army of casual labourers lacked both self-discipline and integrity. The early Labour party, once held up as the epitome of modern, national class-based politics, is now seen to have been rooted in specifically local political cultures. James Keir Hardie son of a farm worker and a local miner. He became Secretary of the newly formed Scottish Labour party in 1888. He became Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil in the same year and elected Chairman of the parliamentary Labour party in 1906, in which role he continued to encourage alliances between trade unions and socialists. Trade unionism had been transformed. Its campaigns against legal restraints radicalised the leadership. A previously anti-socialist movement now had a number of socialist leaders.
