A recurrent theme of the present study has been the dynamic tension which frequently existed between organised party politics and the wider populace. Popular mistrust of party probably had its roots in opposition to the secretive committees of Whig or Tory politicians who often controlled political representation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the mid-Victorian period, however, it had become an important constraint on the emergence of a truly hegemonic Liberalism in many districts. Despite strong popular support for Liberalism as a movement of ‘progress’ and ‘reform’, suspicion of the party ‘wire-puller’, and from the 1870s of the party ‘caucus’, placed a break on the full integration of Radicalism within the Liberal coalition. Among trade unionists, who were for the most part profoundly Radical in outlook, mistrust of party ran especially strong, hence the great emphasis placed on ‘independence’, and the widespread suspicion shown towards leaders such as Howell or Broadhurst who appeared to have sacrificed this independence. From the later 1880s the inflexibility shown by local Liberal parties towards calls for greater labour representation undoubtedly played an important part in the growth of an alternative ‘independent’ Labour politics. This should not, however, obscure the fact that labour's break with Liberalism and the Caucus had its roots in a long-term distrust of party, and in the unresolved tensions between Radicalism and ‘official’ Liberalism. It was, after all, among Radical activists that advocates of the new labour politics found most of their ‘converts’ in the early 1890s.