Agitator: A Life of Keir Hardie

’I am an agitator. My work has consisted of trying to stir up divine discontent with wrong’.

Before Keir Starmer, Labour’s seventh Prime Minister, there was Keir Hardie, the first leader of the party, born into poverty in Lanarkshire in 1856. Simon Webb’s new book re-tells the story of Hardie’s extraordinary life - the life of a man who began work in a coal-mine at the age of ten, and rose to become a formidable voice against war, injustice, inequality and imperialism.