Although this body attracted radicals such as William Morris and George Lansbury, Hyndman was generally disliked as an authoritarian who could not unite his party.

He continued to write for The Pall Mall Gazette, where he praised the British Empire and criticised those advocating for Irish Home Rule.

Unable to find a party that he could fully support, he decided to stand as an independent for the constituency of Marylebone in the 1880 general election.

Denounced as a Tory by William Ewart Gladstone, Hyndman gained very limited support from the electorate and withdrew from the contest, facing certain defeat.

Discovering that Lassalle had been a socialist, sometimes a friend and sometimes an adversary of Karl Marx, Hyndman read The Communist Manifesto.

Hyndman was also greatly influenced by the book Progress and Poverty and the ideology of Henry George known today as Georgism.

When he refused to resign, some members, including William Morris and Eleanor Marx, left the party, forming the Socialist League.

[8] Hyndman continued to lead the SDF and took part in the negotiations to establish the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1900.

Seamus Flaherty argues that "Hyndman's views on the beneficence of the 'great democracies of the English speaking peoples'" were inspired not by Benjamin Disraeli as historians such as Mark Bevir have argued, but rather by Dilke and Mill, whom Hyndman combined their ideas "on the unique character of 'the Angloe-Saxon race' with Mazzini's cosmopolitan patriotism, thus constructing a nationalism fully compatible with 'a good internationalism'.

However, Flaherty writes that "when situated within its proper context, Hyndman's 'intellectual republicanism', so far from being unintelligible, is predictable, insofar as it was characteristic of mid-Victorian liberalism.

Similarly anachronistic was Lenin's complaint that Hyndman 'very poorly understood in 1880 ... the difference between bourgeois democratic and a socialist'.

[11] Hyndman charged "Beit, Barnato and their fellow-Jews" as aiming to create "an Anglo-Hebraic Empire in Africa stretching from Egypt to Cape Colony".

[13] Hyndman supported the antisemitic Viennese riots of 1885, arguing that they represented a blow against Jewish finance capital.

Eleanor Marx wrote privately to Wilhelm Liebknecht that "Mr Hyndman whenever he could do with impunity has endeavoured to set English workmen against foreigners".

Hyndman remained leader of the small party until his death from pneumonia at his home in Well Walk, Hampstead, on 22 November 1921.