BLACKBURN MP Jack Straw has written a tribute to the town's first Socialist MP Philip Snowden who started his career as a Tory "Bogeyman" and ended up branded a Labour traitor.

The Foreign Secretary's article will appear in a book on the founders of the Parliamentary Labour Party published by Routledge on May 16.

The volume, "Men who made Labour", is a series of essays on the first Labour and Independent Labour Party (ILP) MPs - penned by their successors representing their constituencies.

Mr Straw tells how the young Mr Snowden, a weaver's son from Cowling, near Colne, whose family moved to Nelson when the local mill closed in 1879, nearly won Blackburn in 1900 mesmerising local working class voters and terrifying the town's two sitting Tory MPs.

In 1906 their fear was justified when he became one of Blackburn's two MPs representing it for the ILP until 1918 when his opposition to the First World War cost him the seat, despite the support of poet Siegfried Sassoon.

He opposed British expansionism with the slogan "What are empire and glory to a weaver with a pound a week?" This prompted the Tory Weekly Sun newspaper to sketch him as "The Bogeyman" who made "bourgeois flesh creep" and having switched to become MP for Colne Valley, against the wishes of Blackburn, he switched to Labour and became the party's first Chancellor of the Exchequer in its first government in 1924.

But his role as Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's deputy in joining the National Government in 1931 led to his expulsion from the party and branding by the great post-Second World War Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee as a key player in "the greatest betrayal in the political history of this country". Later a Peer, he warned of the "criminal madness" of the oncoming Second World War which he died two years before.

But despite his estrangement from Labour, Mr Straw writes, Snowden, who walked with a stick for most of his life because of illness and a cycling accident, remained wedded to its core principles.

The current MP concludes: "Snowden will always be one of those Labour figures who inspires mixed emotions. Our movement owes a great debt to those like him who fought with such determination for the common cause of their fellow men and women. The Blackburn in which Snowden campaigned was very different to that which I represent today, and yet one only needs to know a little of its history to understand more about the conditions in which he framed the great cause which he espoused."

Despite his part in MacDonald's "great betrayal", Mr Straw concludes he had "huge significance" to the Labour Party and "was a fundamental part of the creation of a truly great instrument of change he so readily espoused."