At the 1885 general election twelve working-class MPs were returned to the House of Commons. As labour members who were unequivocally Gladstonian Liberals in their politics, they subsequently became known as Lib-Labs. Although the Lib-Labs have often been dismissed as holding back the growth of democratic labour politics, revisionist interpretations have stressed that they were in fact the ‘dominant feature’ of English working-class politics: they led the TUC and the organised labour movement, while remaining ‘virtually unshakeable’ in their connection with the Liberal party. This has led to the conclusion that, given the progress organised labour made under the stewardship of these men, the ‘mystery’ of nineteenth-century politics was ‘why such a separate Labour party should eventually have been felt to be necessary at all’.

This current orthodoxy overlooks the significant tensions at the local and national level between the Lib-Lab MPs and the wider labour movement. At the local level, the inability of labour activists to successfully broker deals with organised Liberalism over the selection of working-class candidates at the 1885 general election exposed the fragility of the alliance between the labour movement and the Liberal party. At the national level, the Lib-Lab MPs, the trade union movement, and individual labour activists sharply disagreed over who or what constituted a ‘Labour party’, a term that was widely in use by the mid-1880s.

This chapter begins with the local level by examining both the nature of the deals struck between the successful Lib-Lib MPs and organised Liberalism in 1885, and the tensions between the wider Lib-Lab movement and local Liberal associations that were exposed when a working-class candidate failed to garner the Liberal nomination, paying particular attention to the tactics used by both sides in the subsequent parliamentary campaign. The second part of the chapter addresses disagreements at the national level by analysing the competing definitions of a ‘Labour party’ in the mid-1880s, giving close scrutiny to whether the term stood for a particular group of people or a specific programme. Of course, the main protagonists in this debate were not operating in a vacuum.