Abstract

Dr Gavin B. Clark has some claim to be being the most radical member of the UK Parliament in the late nineteenth century. He sat as a ‘Crofter’ MP for Caithness from 1885 to 1900. He was identified as the most extreme ‘Pro-Boer’ and defeated by a Liberal Imperialist in the 1900 election. Clark has left an impressionistic account of his career, ‘Rambling Recollections of an Agitator’, an appropriately entitled series of articles in The Forward, the Glasgow based newspaper of the Independent Labour Party. What emerges from this account is the range of radical causes in which Clark had been involved from the late 1860s until his election to Parliament for Caithness in 1885. His view on the land question, on which he agitated in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland, was straightforward advocacy of land nationalisation. The chapter looks at Clark's views in their wider context, analyses his publications and parliamentary speeches and other public statements in order to place his views on the land question in relation to his wider demands for social reform.

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