He resigned in 1908 in favour of Arthur Henderson, and spent his remaining years campaigning for causes such as women's suffrage, self-rule for India, and opposition to World War I.

James Keir Hardie was born on 15 August 1856 in a two-roomed cottage on the western edge of Newhouse, Lanarkshire near Holytown, a small town close to Motherwell in Scotland.

[2] The growing family soon moved to the shipbuilding burgh of Govan near Glasgow (which wasn't incorporated into the city until 1912), where they made a life in a very difficult financial situation, with his stepfather attempting to maintain continuous employment in the shipyards rather than practising his trade at sea – never an easy proposition given the boom-and-bust cycle of the industry.

Formal schooling henceforth became impossible, but his parents spent evenings teaching him to read and write, skills which proved essential for future self-education.

[6] At the age of ten years old, Hardie went to work in the mines as a "trapper": opening and closing a door for a ten-hour shift to maintain the air supply for miners in a given section.

On 3 July 1879, Hardie was appointed Corresponding Secretary of the miners, a post which gave him opportunity to get in touch with other representatives of the mine workers throughout southern Scotland.

While the Lanarkshire mine strike was a failure, Hardie's energy and activity shone and he accepted a call from Ayrshire to relocate there to organise the local miners.

[14] The young couple moved to the town of Cumnock, where Keir set to work organising a union of local miners, a process which occupied nearly a year.

[15] In August 1881, Ayrshire miners put forward the demand for a 10 per cent increase in wages, a proposition summarily refused by the region's mine owners.

Hardie concluded that the Liberal Party wanted the worker's votes without in return the radical reform he believed to be crucial – he stood for Parliament.

In Parliament, Hardie advocated a graduated income tax, free schooling, pensions, the abolition of the House of Lords and for women's right to vote.

In 1893, Hardie and others formed the Independent Labour Party, an action that worried the Liberals, who were afraid that the ILP might, at some point in the future, win the working-class votes that they traditionally received.

Hardie hit the headlines in 1894, when after an explosion at the Albion colliery in Cilfynydd near Pontypridd which killed 251 miners, he asked that a message of condolence to the relatives of the victims be added to an address of congratulations on the birth of a royal heir (the future Edward VIII).

The request was refused and Hardie made a speech in the House of Commons attacking the monarchy, which almost predicted the nature of the future king's marriage that led to his abdication.

In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow—[Loud cries of 'Oh, oh!’ and 'Order!’]—and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill.

[27] Despite his own support for Irish home rule, Hardie, who made repeated visits, appeared determined to treat Belfast as a "typical British city", confident that class politics could surmount sectarian division over the constitutional question.

If it is necessary for me to separate myself from what has been my life's work, I do so in order to remove the stigma resting upon our wives, mothers and sisters of being accounted unfit for citizenship.

The precedent became the basis of a "conscience clause" in its standing orders, and would be invoked by party leader Michael Foot in 1981 to argue that the will of the conference should not always bind the PLP.

According to Hardie, the Lithuanian migrant workers in the mining industry had "filthy habits", they lived off "garlic and oil", and they were carriers of "the Black Death".

[35] After resigning the leadership of the party in 1908, Hardie devoted himself to campaigning for votes for women and developing a closer relationship with Sylvia Pankhurst.

His stance was not popular, even within the Labour Party, but he continued to address anti-war demonstrations across the country and to support conscientious objectors.

That would be foolish in the extreme, until, at least, the Germans have been driven back across their own frontier, a consummation which, I fear, carries us forward through a long and dismal vista.

[38] His friend and fellow pacifist Thomas Evan Nicholas (Niclas y Glais) delivered the sermon at Hardie's memorial service at Aberdare, in his constituency.

On 2 December 2006, a memorial bust of Hardie was unveiled by Cynon Valley MP Ann Clwyd outside council offices in Aberdare (in his former constituency).

Alan Morrison has, in turn, used the title Keir Hardie Street for his 2010 narrative long poem in which a fictitious, turn-of-the-century, working-class poet discovers a socialist utopia off the dreamt-up Sea-Green Line of the London Underground.

In Merthyr Tydfil, there is also a Keir Hardie Estate with streets named after prominent early Independent Labour leaders such as Wallhead and Glasier.

Biographer Kenneth O. Morgan has sketched Hardie's personality: I found him a man who was not only an idealistic crusader, but a pragmatist, anxious to work with radical Liberals whose ideology he largely shared, subtle in building up the Labour alliance with the trade unions and the other socialist bodies, and supremely flexible in his political philosophy, a very generalised socialism based on a secularised Christianity rather than Marxism.

'Socialists,' he proclaimed, 'made war on a system not a class'....He was no economist and was ill-informed on many issues, but he had uniquely the charisma and vision that any radical movement needs.

[56] Among the co-founders was Cathy Jamieson, who at the time was the MSP for the constituency of Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, which covers the area where Hardie lived most of his life.

[58] Hardie appears as a character in Howard Spring's 1940 novel, Fame Is the Spur, in which he gives advice and support to the main protaganists in the early days of the labour movement.