It is the successor to the Independent Labour Party and is mostly known simply as "The ILP" in order to maintain that link with its predecessor organisation.
Since its re-establishment in 1975, the ILP has been a campaigning organisation rather than an electoral group (its constitution prevents full members from standing for elective office).
It has been involved with opposition to various workfare schemes imposed by the British Conservative government of the 1980s, and has argued for open democratic structures within the Labour Party, and an emphasis on co-operative systems of organising economic activity.
But unlike much of the left, it accepts the idea of a market economy as part of democratic socialist thinking.
[3] The ILP has been out of line with many traditional leftist positions, for instance in its rejection of a simple "troops out" approach to the conflict in Northern Ireland,[4][5] and was critical of what it saw as knee-jerk anti-Americanism on the left following the US's reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks.