The old Labour movement and Jim Connell, the author of The Red Flag, continue to have profound lessons today for Tony Blair's British Labour Party, argues

James D Young

JIM Connell, author of The Red Flag and iconoclastic icon of the left, lived in Glasgow for most of the 1890s. On the left of the left, he would not have anything in common with the present leader of the Brits' right-wing Labour Party, Tony Blair.

When Mrs Katherine Gatty published her article Jim Connell, author of The Red Flag in the [Irish] Labour News in 1936, she said: ``The Rand miners in South Africa went to the gallows singing it (The Red Flag). It was sung in the House of Commons, and heard in the Dublin Mansion House. A Scottish MP declared that ``The Red Flag did more for socialism on the Clyde than anything else''.

One of the most colourful of the nineteenth-century Irish characters, Connell, who lived in Glasgow towards the end of last century, was a fierce critic of British imperialism.

He identified with the struggle for an independent socialist Scotland, and, despite the pro-imperialist views of English socialist leaders like H M Hyndman, he celebrated ``the centenary of the Irish Rebellion'' of 1798. Rather optimistically he asserted that: ``There are few socialists to whom it is necessary to point out that the Irish nationalist movement means much more than what is called jingoism in England, or `Spreadeagleism'' in America.''

Throughout his long life, Connell was not a prolific poet or writer - though some of his lost and neglected pamphlets could yet turn up. In 1898 the well-known London publishers William Reeves published his substantial pamphlet The Truth about the Game Laws: a record of cruelty, selfishness, and oppression. Alongside the agitations and pamphleteering of the Scottish Land and Labour leader Alexander Robertson (1825-1893), Connell defended poachers.

In 1901 the London publisher C Arthur Pearson published Connell's small autobiographical book Confessions of a Poacher with illustrations by S T Dadd. It was well-written, anti-landlord, and - with fine anecdotes of his boyhood experiences in Ireland - entertaining. There are several passages in his Confessions of a Poacher that are coloured by his poetic-prose and lyricism. A second edition was published the following year, and it sold 80,000 copies.

``Big Jim Connell'' was most unconventional and, when he was a young man, something of an adventurer. However, though he has been surprisingly neglected by Labour historians, the sentiments of his song The Red Flag continue to haunt Tony Blair and what Connell's generation of socialists called ``The Blind Leaders of the Blind,'' or the ``Labour lieutenants of capitalism.''

In the book Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain 1750-1968, Eric J Hobsbawm devoted his penultimate chapter to ``the Other Britain'' of the Celtic fringe. Just as he ignored John Maclean, the famous socialist (1879-1923), so he did not even condescend to mention ``Big Jim'' Larkin or James Connolly.

Besides, although he did not mention either Robert Tressell or Jim Connell by name, Hobsbawm referred to them indirectly by asserting that ``an Irishman wrote The Red Flag, the anthem of the British Labour movement and the best British working-class novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists''.

By reflecting the Anglocentric bias of British Labour historians, Hobsbawm did not feel any need to probe into what was known of the biography of Jim Connell.

And yet, at different moments in the history of the British Labour movement, leaders of English socialism, such as H M Hyndman in the 1890s, were not able to escape from Connell's struggle for genuine socialism from below. Moreover, in the 1990s, the old Labour movement and the author of The Red Flag continue to have profound lessons for Tony Blair's British Labour Party.

The Red Flag was written during the great London dockers' strike of 1889, and its publication in Justice, the organ of the Social Democratic Federation, guaranteed Connell's immortality and place in ``the Pantheon of Labour's mighty dead''.

Even so, Labour historians have shown surprisingly little interest in this important Irish socialist's attitude to nationalism and internationalism. Enjoying a history of its own, Connell's song or hymn was reprinted, together with The Internationale, in The Socialist Sunday School Song Book (1910). In the following year, it was reprinted in The Scottish Sunday School Hymn Book (1911). The words in those two small booklets were very different.

In the best-known version of The Red Flag the opening verse triumphantly asserts that:

The people's flag is deepest red;

It shrouded oft our martyred dead,

And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold

Their heart's blood dyed its very fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high!

Within its shade we'll live and die.

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,

We'll keep the Red Flag flying here.

In the final verse, the words are intended to inspire all those who wanted - and still want - a new society of equals:

With heads uncovered swear we all

To bear it forward 'til we fall,

Come dungeon dark or gallows grim,

This song shall be our parting hymn.

Like many of his Irish counterparts on the left, Connell was simultaneously an Irish nationalist and a socialist internationalist. Though he hated English imperialism (as distinct from English working folk), he viewed the whole historical evolution of mankind as a tragedy based on the martyrdom of man and particularly of Labour.

At the very core of his understanding of universal history was the view expressed by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Labriola, that: ``Labour, which is the prerequisite of all progress, has pressed the sufferings, the privations, the travail, and the ills of the multitude into the service of the comfort of the few. History is like an inferno. It might be presented as a sombre drama, entitled The Tragedy of Labour.''

In the second thoroughly internationalist verse, Connell identified with working folk throughout the world who were struggling for their freedom. As he put it:

Look round: the Frenchman loves its blaze;

The sturdy German chants its praise;

In Moscow's vaults its hymns are sung;

Chicago swells the surging throng.

When I interviewed Bob Selkirk, the veteran Scottish communist and pre-First World War anarchist, in 1973, he told me that the third verse of the version of another Connell song in The Socialist Sunday School Song Book had been scratched out by the Stalinist communists in the late 1920s because it was being interpreted by the anarchists as an implicit criticism of a Russia without the Soviets. It read:

We hail the living heroes, too

Who now in anguish pine;

Who wait for death in a German fort,

Or deep in Russian mine.

James Connell was born in Killskyre, Crossakiel, County Meath, in 1850. Though not too much is known of his early life, he was, according to Henry Boylan's book A Dictionary of Irish Biography (1978), ``a sheep farmer, labourer, journalist, and self-taught lawyer''.

He to London at some point in the 1880s; and he wrote The Red Flag in 1889. By the 1890s, he already belonged with James Connolly to the predominantly Scottish and Irish ``impossibilist'' tendency: left-wing critics of H M Hyndman's London-controlled Social Democratic Federation.

In their book Creative Revolution, Eden and Cedar Paul, the English communist historians, described Connell's role in the 1890s in fostering the Marxist education of the members of the Social Democratic Federation at the same time as he was criticising Hyndman and the English leadership's softness towards British imperialism.

CONNELL was always in trouble with the respectable middle-class socialists like Hyndman and Ramsay MacDonald.

Tony Blair's new - and sadly respectable - defence of ``free market'' capitalism or no, one of the few constant anchors in the history of Scottish, Irish, and English working folk, who have always struggled against dirt-cheap wages and social injustice, was - and is - the inspiration provided by The Red Flag. But the anthem of the British Labour movement has always caused trouble in one way or another.

In 1895 A S Headingley, who had assisted Communards in the revolutionary city of Paris in 1871, set the words of The Red Flag to an old German air, Tannenbaum. Connell was a Celt from head to toe; and he was a Celt who was an internationalist. He disliked the imperialist attitudes of the dominant leadership of the Social Democratic Federation. By an irony of history, however, Connell had had in mind the air of the lively Jacobite song, The White Cockade.

But, although Connell was still an active member of the Social Democratic Federation, it was left to the independent Labour Party in Glasgow to publish his pamphlet celebrating the centenary of the Rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798. In Brothers At Last: A Centenary Appeal to Celt and Saxon (1898), he asked the Independent Labour Party to ``place on its programme National Independence for Ireland''.

To emphasise his distance from the respectable policy of official British Labour, he said: ``Let National Independence be clearly defined as meaning not the unintelligible Home Rule of political time-servers, but absolute National Separation.''

The author of The Red Flag was never popular with Ramsay MacDonald; and it is difficult to imagine any of Tony Blair's predecessors sitting beside him in a pub with a pint of beer. Certainly, Harry McShane, the last of the Red Clydesiders, did recall stumbling upon Connell sitting in an obscure corner of a London pub in the early 1920s.

Popular in post-1916 Dublin, The Red Flag inspired the left during the holocaust of the Great War. It dominated gatherings of socialists all over Britain in the early post-war years; and, when MacDonald became the first Prime Minister of a Labour Government in 1924, he replied to the King's criticism that members of his Party had been heard singing The Red Flag by insisting that it was only ``a few of our extremists''!

A few extremists or not, in the same year of 1924, MacDonald tried to get rid of The Red Flag as British Labour's anthem. To quell the latent protest from the left of his own party, he organised a competition to find a substitute. In due course, the Judges, John McCormack and Sir Hugh Roberton, reported that none of the 300 entries was as good as The Red Flag.

To the great delight of the elderly Connell, The Red Flag remained the socialist anthem of Labour in Britain. As an unrepentant Celt and man of the extreme left, he had lived in London, the heart of the British Empire, for many years. Though the exact place of his death remains unknown, he died in London on February 8, 1929.

In his brilliant novel Cloud Howe (1933), one of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's characters said: ``Ramsay MacDonald, as the English knew well, they could not breed the like of Ramsay in England''. Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh - and he will qualify for ordinary citizenship in the future Scottish Socialist Republic. But since Blair's symbiotic Till Death Do Us Part relationship with the British Labour Party will surely force him to get rid of The Red Flag for once and for all, he must be hoping that Connell's ghost will finally be put to rest.

In circumstances of unemployment and poverty world-wide, more and more working and middle-class folk will challenge inequality and unfairness. Far from being ``at the end of history'', the coming break-up of the Brits' Labour Party might well herald the socialist-humanism of the twenty-first century.

The ghost of Jim Connell and his The Red Flag will continue to haunt Tony Blair, and all the forces of the aggressive counter-revolution now underway. As the national bard Robert Burns said at a similar turning-point in history: ``Today tis theirs, tomorrow we shall don the cap of liberty.''

n James D Young is a historian based in Central Scotland. For many years he taught at Stirling University. He has written several books and is close to completing his latest, a study of prominent Scottish radicals.