Jimmy Maxton: Has Scotland fulfilled the potential the master of rhetoric saw?

“Give us our Parliament in Scotland. We will start with no traditions. We will start with ideals. We will start with purpose, with courage.

“We will start with the aim and object that there will be 134 men and women, pledged to 134 Scottish constituencies, to spend their whole brain power, their whole courage and their whole soul in making Scotland into a country in which we can take people from all the nations of the Earth and say: this is our land, this is our Scotland, these are our people, these are our men, our works, our women and children: can you beat it?”

Jimmy Maxton delivered this speech more than 100 years ago, just before he was about to be elected MP for Glasgow Bridgeton in the General Election of 1922. He was soon recognised as one of the masters of rhetoric in his time.

It is worth comparing what a modern Jimmy Maxton might say in similar circumstances. He supported Scottish Home Rule, as he always put it, but said nothing about the differences, if any, with the independence of the Irish Republic.

It is doubtful he would get away with that today. After all, Gordon Brown wrote his doctoral thesis on Maxton and in the air were heavy hints that in government they might look much the same. They did so only as failures.

The same goes with the generalities on policy. Ideals and purpose and courage still have their place in politics, just about, but surely we have learned over a century that they will not be much good on their own. They need preparation in public debate and compromise with powerful opposition, if only to pick out the problems that emerge from detailed argument.

We need to recall that Maxton, for all his talents, never got into ministerial office and left nothing on the statute book, only the columns of his windy prose in Hansard. We might wonder, now that Home Rule has gone on for nearly a quarter-century, if it has fulfilled the potential he saw.

Early recordings show Maxton spoke not the patter, not working-class Glaswegian, but rather a more neutral middle-class accent, though still clearly one from the west of Scotland. He had been born in 1885 in suburban Pollokshaws, the son of schoolteachers who voted for the Liberal Unionist Party – that is, held rather conservative opinions.

His upbringing was bourgeois throughout: bursary to Hutcheson’s Grammar School; Presbyterian morality; teacher training after a degree at the University of Glasgow, graduating in 1909.

Maxton’s radicalism was self-taught. He joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1904, preached the evangelical socialist culture of the time and cultivated the grandiloquence that marked his political reputation in years to come. He was a man with a striking physical appearance, a long mane of black hair and a tall spindly frame. He stood out from other politicians of his day through his humorous and passionate rapport with his audiences.

While he was an admirer, and in educational matters, a colleague, of the revolutionary socialist John Maclean (above, also from Pollokshaws), Maxton’s socialism was at the outset a matter of gradual reforms little influenced by Marxist dogma. His early career looked not so much revolutionary as bureaucratic. He got elected to the national administrative council of the ILP in 1912, and from 1913-19 served as chairman of the Scottish party.

It took the First World War to raise Maxton’s public profile as a militant activist. He was ready to throw away his personal career for the sake of his pacifism. In 1916 he got a prison sentence for a speech on Glasgow Green in protest against the deportation from the city of leading shop stewards. On his release in 1917 he still refused to do war work.

More than any other leader or agitator, Maxton seemed to personify a plain pithiness in Red Clydeside where industrial disputes and rent strikes counted for more than the fate of the empire or Europe.

After the war Maxton again could find no paid job except as an organiser for the ILP. But that at least assured him victory at Bridgeton in 1922, the year of the party’s breakthrough in the west of Scotland. It won 10 of Glasgow’s 15 seats and others outside the city. A triumphant image showed up in a new age of sensational political graphics. For example, it had the ILP victors cock-a-hoop as they caught the sleeper south at St Enoch Station.

Their aim was to shake up Parliament, and Maxton led the pack. Tories were easy meat for him. To get expelled from the Commons chamber, he just had to call them murderers and refuse to withdraw.

Yet it was not long before his warmth of personality won the affection of other politicians who joined him in the wilderness because nobody would listen to them either. Winston Churchill became a great admirer and John Buchan (below) something of a crony.

Leftward links were looser. Maxton and his more calculating mentor John Wheatley, kept the doctrinal fires burning bright red. This was easier in Scotland because the affiliated ILP remained more popular on the ground than the official national Labour Party. It was a difference between left and right, between militancy and gradualism.

The ILP set out its ambitions in a programme, Socialism in Our Time, which provided the ideological ammunition for Maxton’s eloquent assaults on unemployment and poverty.

His relations with the parliamentary Labour Party, led by Ramsay MacDonald, grew uneasy in the 1920s, with Maxton being accused of undemocratic behaviour in his disrespect for the executive.

Maxton in fact became a fierce critic of the Labour government in 1929-31. His behaviour raised basic questions about the relationship between the parent party and the ILP, and the freedom of action for a mere affiliate. They came to a head after Labour’s split and the formation of a national government.

Maxton and a majority of the ILP opted for disaffiliation from Labour in 1932. History has not justified the rebels’ intransigence.

But even in the 21st century, leaders of the left have scorned gradualism in favour of principled opposition. Splinter groups perform a useful function in keeping the Labour Party alert to its values and aims, after these have been inevitably diluted by the demands of government. Still, it all leaves Labour politicians on the margins in the long run, so that Maxton’s experience was far more common than Brown’s.

After the rout of the left, Maxton drifted to the fringes. He turned his sights increasingly to international questions as a pacifist cause. The Spanish Civil War was the only armed conflict he ever supported. He found it in himself even to oppose the struggle against Adolf Hitler.

Failing health reduced the impact of his interventions. He was a chain-smoker all his adult life and an eventual victim of lung cancer in his 60s.

But it was not for his standards of analysis that Maxton deserves to be remembered. He was a Scottish radical whose propagandist skills for the wider British Labour movement earned him folk hero status in socialist circles, recalled today in hardly more hopeful conditions.