The Independent Labour Party was founded in 1893 by - among others - Keir Hardie, MP, a Scottish Labour and socialist hero who is gloriously remembered to this day. The ILP was one of the groups that helped to found the Labour Party, and for many years was an affiliate of it. It saw itself as Labour’s socialist conscience. After World War One, a pro-Soviet section of the party broke off and joined the Communist Party.

In the 1920s, the ILP, increasingly to the left of the party mainstream, had ceased to affiliate to the Labour Party; its main base thenceforth was on Clydeside ("Red Clydesiders"). It then acted as an independent socialist party (mainly Marxist, but anti-Communist). Its rightwing saw itself as the conscience-in-exile of the Labour Party, whilst its leftwing saw itself as a revolutionary vanguard (though in truth the party had no plans for revolution). Its journal was called the "New Leader". It was an anti-militarist party, though not strictly a pacifist one. It saw war as imperialistic (and therefore it opposed World War Two); it also strongly opposed the League of Nations, and saw fascism as the final (dying) stage of capitalism. Its leader was Fenner Brockway (later Lord Brockway, who died in 1988 at the age of 99), and the party had close contacts with the Spanish POUM (Marxist Workers’ Party). Bernard Crick intriguingly notes that the ILP was an "aggressively heterosexual" party.

George Orwell was a member of the ILP for a few years in the late 1930s. He originally agreed with the ILP line that a second world war would merely serve capitalist-imperialist purposes - but he changed his mind.

On the face of it, yes: every force in this war was fighting primarily on the basis of economic or political self-interest. All the talk of fighting on behalf of liberalism or democracy was just as much cant as it had been in WWI, in terms of the actual motives of the major powers for having the war. Yet there was some truth in this cant - for the war did, under its imperialist surface, represent a fascist vs liberal dialectic.