In November 1868 a leading article in the Bee-Hive declared that

The call for direct labour representation – understood here as the election of working-class men to Parliament to represent the labour interest as Liberal MPs rather than independently – had enjoyed a broad range of support during the reform agitations that followed the establishment of the Reform League in February 1865. Gladstone, along with several prominent Liberal MPs, such as Henry Fawcett and Peter Alfred Taylor, had spoken in support of working-class parliamentary representation, while the working-class radicals in whom the management of the Reform League was vested were zealous advocates for the labour movement having its own voice inside the Commons. However, in the decade following the 1867 Reform Act – which enfranchised ‘registered and residential’ male householders, giving the vote to thirty per cent of working men – the labour movement struggled to secure the return of their own representatives. As discussed below, the obstacles presented by issues of finance, organisation, localism and disagreements within the labour movement itself over the merits of working-class representation were undoubtedly great. Yet, as indicated by the above pronouncement from the Bee-Hive, the labour movement made an explicit connection between the failure of their candidates at the poll and a Liberal party that was hostile to direct labour representation.

The parliamentary and local election campaigns of working-class candidates in the decade following the 1867 Reform Act offer an important insight into not only the debates concerning the political representation of the labour movement but also the difficult and often strained relationship between labour and organised Liberalism. Because the story of the labour candidates in this period was largely one of failure, and the leaders of the labour movement chose to explain their defeats in terms of the intransigence of local Liberal associations, historians have arguably overlooked the extent to which the tactics labour adopted when interacting with organised Liberalism could be fluid and contingent. Moreover, the fact that, in some instances, working-class candidates were willing to actively assert their independence from the Liberal party has largely been ignored.