The party played a key role in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, to which ILP members Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald were delegates at its foundation in 1900.

Many socialist intellectuals, particularly those influenced by Christian socialism and similar notions of the ethical need for a restructuring of society, also saw the Liberals as the most obvious means for obtaining working-class representation.

A number of so-called "Lib-Lab" candidates were subsequently elected Members of Parliament by this alliance of trade unions and radical intellectuals working within the Liberal Party.

Other socialist intellectuals, despite not sharing the concept of class struggle were nonetheless frustrated with the ideology and institutions of the Liberal Party and the secondary priority which it appeared to give to its working-class candidates.

Out of these ideas and activities came a new generation of activists, including Keir Hardie, a Scot who had become convinced of the need for independent labour politics while working as a Gladstonian Liberal and trade union organiser in the Lanarkshire coalfield.

Hardie owed nothing to the Liberal Party for his election, and his critical and confrontational style in Parliament caused him to emerge as a national voice of the labour movement.

[4] About 130 delegates were in attendance at the conference, including, in addition to Hardie, such socialist and labour worthies as Alderman Ben Tillett, author George Bernard Shaw, and Edward Aveling, partner of Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor and translator of his Das Kapital.

[5] German Socialist leader Edward Bernstein was briefly permitted to address the gathering to pass along the best wishes for success from the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

[5] Despite the apparent timidity in naming the organisation, the inaugural conference overwhelmingly accepted that the object of the party should be "to secure the collective and communal ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange".

[6] The keynote address of the foundation conference was delivered by Keir Hardie, who observed that the Labour Party was "not an organisation but rather 'the expression of a great principle,' since it 'had neither programme nor constitution".

[5] Hardie emphasised the fundamental demand of the new organisation as being the achievement of economic freedom and called for a party structure which gave full autonomy to every locality, and only seeking to bind these groups "to such central and general principles as were indispensable to the progress of the movement".

From its beginning, the ILP was never a homogeneous unit, but rather attempted to act as a "big tent" party of the working class, advocating a rather vague and amorphous socialist agenda.

Fervent and emotional, the socialism of the ILP could accommodate, with only a little strain, temperance reform, Scottish nationalism, Methodism, Marxism, Fabian gradualism, and even a variety of Burkean conservatism.

In addition to the beloved party leader Keir Hardie came the Scot Bruce Glasier, elected to the NAC in 1897 and succeeding Hardie as Chairman in 1900; Philip Snowden, an evangelical socialist from the West Riding, and Ramsay MacDonald, whose adhesion to the ILP had been secured in the wake of his disillusionment with the Liberal Party over its rejection of a trade unionist candidate in the 1894 Sheffield Attercliffe by-election.

While there were substantial personal tensions between the four, they shared a fundamental view that the party should seek alliance with the unions and rather than an ideology-based socialist unity with the Marxist Social Democratic Federation.

By 1898 the decision was formally made to restrict electoral contests to those where a reasonable performance could be expected rather than putting forward as many candidates as possible to maximise exposure for the party and to accumulate a maximum total vote.

Individual rank and file trade unionists could be persuaded to join the party out of a political commitment shaped by their industrial experiences, but connection with top leaderships was lacking.

The emergence and growth of the Labour Party, a federation of trade unions with the socialist intellectuals of the ILP, helped its constituent parts develop and grow.

"[10]While this inspirational presentation of socialism as a humanitarian necessity made the party accessible as a sort of secular religion or a means for the practical implementation of Christian principles in daily life, it bore with it the great weakness of being non-analytical and thus comparatively shallow.

Consequently, in 1912 came a split in which many ILP branches and a few leading figures, including Leonard Hall and Russell Smart, chose to amalgamate with the SDF of H. M. Hyndman in 1912 to found the British Socialist Party.

As one observer later put it: "Hyndman and Cunningham Graham, Thorne and Clynes had sought peace while it endured, but now that war had come, well, Socialists and Trade Unionists, like other people had got to see it through.

Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, W. C. Anderson, and a small group of like-minded radical pacifists, maintained an unflinching opposition to the government and its pro-war Labour allies.

[21] Stewards at the door of the ILP meeting were overpowered by the mob, who in what was described as a "riotous scene" broke chairs and wielded their parts as weapons, seizing the auditorium and dispersing the socialists into the night.

In January 1919, Moscow issued a call for the formation of a new Third International, a formation which held great appeal to a small section of the ILP's most radical members, including economist Emile Burns, journalist R. Palme Dutt, and the future Member of Parliament Shapurji Saklatvala, along with Charles Barber, Ernest H. Brown, Helen Crawfurd, C. H. Norman, and J. Wilson.

The faction began to produce its own bi-weekly newspaper called The International, a four-page broadsheet published in Glasgow, and sent greetings to the conference which established a Communist Party of Great Britain, although they did not attend.

In a letter dated 21 May 1920, ILP chairman Richard Wallhead and National Council member Clifford Allen asked a further set of questions of the Comintern.

The Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) was asked for its positions on such matters as demands for rigid adherence to its programme, applicability of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet system to Great Britain, and its view on the necessity of armed force as a universal principle.

[T]hese leaders have lost touch with the wide unskilled masses, with the toiling poor, they have become oblivious of the growth of capitalist exploitation and of the revolutionary aims of the proletariat.

One such contest, the Cardiff East by-election in 1942, resulted in the bizarre situation that the local Labour and Communist machinery campaigned against ILP candidate Fenner Brockway in favour of a Conservative.

However, all its MPs defected to Labour at various stages in 1947, and the party was roundly defeated at the 1948 Glasgow Camlachie by-election, in a seat it had won easily only three years earlier.