Labour Leader
British socialist newspaper (1888–1986)
The Labour Leader was a British socialist newspaper published for almost one hundred years. It was later renamed New Leader and Socialist Leader, before finally taking the name Labour Leader again.
19th century
The origins of the paper lay in The Miner, a monthly paper founded by Keir Hardie in 1887. Its main purpose was to advocate for a federation of Scottish miners. The first issue contained an influential programme for labour, co-authored by Hardie and Chisholm Robertson, marking Hardie's switch from support for the Liberal Party to advocating independent labour candidacies. The paper was used as Hardie's platform in the 1888 Mid Lanarkshire by-election, following which Hardie became a founder member of the Scottish Labour Party and relaunched The Miner as the Labour Leader.
In 1893, the Scottish Labour Party affiliated to the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Hardie became the party's first leader and began using the Labour Leader as a forum for the development of policy for the new party. In 1894 he was able to increase the paper's frequency from monthly to weekly.
20th century
Hardie continued to publish and edit the Labour Leader until 1904, when he sold it to the ILP, amid some controversy on the appropriate recompense due to him.
“Labour Leader” enters the record as british socialist newspaper (1888–1986). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Labour, Leader and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Labour Leader” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Labour, Leader and British provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1799521. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1888, 1893 and 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “Labour Leader” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.