Independent Labour Party

Independent Labour Party
AbbreviationILP
FounderKeir Hardie
Founded1893
Dissolved1975
Preceded byScottish Labour Party
Bloomsbury Socialist Society
Scottish United Trades Councils Labour Party
Merged intoLabour Party
Succeeded byIndependent Labour Publications (pressure group inside the Labour Party)
HeadquartersMentmore Terrace, London (till 1964)
NewspaperLabour Leader
Ideology
Political positionLeft-wing
National affiliationLabour Party (1906–1932)
International affiliation
Portrait of ILP leader Keir Hardie painted at the time of the foundation of the organisation in 1893

The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a British political party of the left, established in 1893 at a conference in Bradford, after local and national dissatisfaction with the Liberals' apparent reluctance to endorse working-class candidates. A sitting independent MP and prominent union organiser, Keir Hardie, became its first chairman.

The party remained positioned to the left of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Representation Committee, which Hardie founded in 1900 and was soon renamed the Labour Party, and to which the ILP was affiliated from 1906 to 1932. In 1947, the organisation's three parliamentary representatives defected to the Labour Party, and the organisation rejoined Labour as Independent Labour Publications in 1975.