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In 1893, Keir Hardie founded an Independent Labour Party with the intention of gaining the election of members of the working class to parliament.In 1900, the Labour Representation Committee was formed by a number of unions, the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society (founded 1884) and the Social Democratic Federation (founded in 1881 as a Marxist party), with the objective of promoting a separate parliamentary labour party. While these groups did not always agree on the details of policy and strategy, the LRC met with considerable success in the 1906 General Election, when twenty-nine of its fifty candidates were elected (after an electoral pact with the Liberal Party). The Labour Party, as the LRC was known from this time, entered the wartime coalition government in 1915 and was reorganised in 1918, when a modern party organisation was established and a constitution drafted. The Labour Party replaced the Liberal Party as the main party of opposition to the Conservatives over the following decade.
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