When Keir Hardie sought the Liberal nomination at the Mid-Lanark by-election in April 1888, his supporters claimed that his candidature was ‘a test question as to how far the professed love of the Liberal party for labour representation is a reality’.

Following his rejection at the hands of the Mid-Lanark Liberal Association, and his subsequent heavy defeat as an independent labour candidate, it appeared that, for Hardie, the question had been answered. Addressing his supporters, he declared that

Hardie's attempt to mythologise his rejection and defeat was given added weight when, following the decision of the Attercliffe Liberal Association in Sheffield to select a local alderman and employer instead of a well-known local trade unionist for that division's by-election in July 1894, Ramsay MacDonald wrote to Hardie that

For many labour activists, a local Liberal association, known pejoratively as the ‘caucus’, was their political bogeyman. When the Birmingham brassworker William John Davis was denied the Liberal nomination for a local school board election, the chairman of his election committee dryly noted that ‘if an angel from heaven came down … unless he had the imprimatur of the Liberal Association he was unfit for office’. Supporters of labour representation in Parliament could be vitriolic in their condemnation of the caucus if it rejected a working man's candidate. For them, ‘the question was whether the Liberal caucus should rule eternally as a despotic tyrant.’ Subsequent labour autobiographies mythologised and entrenched this picture of the ‘dictatorial’ caucus causing working men to leave the Liberals and champion an independent Labour party. George Lansbury, who became leader of the Labour party in 1932, wrote that his break with Liberalism came in 1889 when, at the National Liberal Federation's annual conference, he was ‘gently but firmly pushed down the steps’ when he tried to move a resolution in favour of the eight-hour day.