John Burns - Parliamentary Career

Parliamentary Career

Sing a song of sixpence,
Dockers on the strike.
Guinea pigs are hungry,
As the greedy pike.
Till the docks are opened,
Burns for you will speak.
Courage lads, and you'll win,
Well within the week.

In 1892, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Battersea as an Independent Labour Party member and held his seat until 1918, although he changed his parliamentary allegiance in that time. He displayed fervent Parliamentary opposition to the Second Boer War (1900). Burns became well known as an independent Radical, but while fellow socialist Keir Hardie argued for the formation of a new political party, Burns remained aligned with the Liberal Party. In December 1905 Campbell-Bannerman included him in the cabinet as President of the Local Government Board, the second workingman (after Henry Broadhurst) to serve as a government minister. Burns remained proud of his working class roots, declaring to the Commons in a speech in 1901: "I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman". He received praise for his administrative policy and for refusing to adopt some of the extreme proposals of the Labour Party, and was retained in the government after H. H. Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1905.

In 1914 Burns was appointed President of the Board of Trade, but after the start of the First World War, he resigned from the government in protest and left political life in 1918.