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Late publicizing this but I had an article in the Labour History Review last year about how Chartists split from Radical-Liberals to form the first independent working-class electoral party in the world 1/5 https://sslh.org.uk/2020/08/01/chartisms-electoral-strategy-and-the-bifurcation-of-radicalism-1837-1852/
Two important points are that the People's Charter itself was actually intended to be a manifesto for the 1837 General Election, and that forming an independent worker's party in Parliament was one of the key ideas of the movement from the outset. Secondly...2/5
this split from Liberalism became more pronounced as Chartist and Liberal ideas of electoral corruption diverged, with each drawing on different aspects of the radical tradition. For Chartists, electoral corruption was both a form of political control and morally degrading 3/5
which became coupled with its emerging critique of capitalism. For Liberals like Cobden and Bright corruption was acceptable as it fought Tories on their own terms and therefore ultimately 'balanced' the constitution by putting Libs in Parliament 4/6
Because of this Liberals in the Complete Suffrage Union were a serious threat to Chartists after 1842, because they copied both the points of the Charter and the culture of electoral purity, while still seeking to use bourgeois extra-political power to influence workers 5/6
Those Liberals whom Chartists did endorse (e.g. Duncombe and Wakley) had to accept the Chartist terms: the Charter, representing an independent working-class movement, and 'electoral purity'. In 1852 social democracy was added to this list, but that wasn't so successful 6/6
p.s. in another article coming out at some point in the future I trace this doctrine of 'electoral purity' back to the London Corresponding Society and John Thelwall in particular
