Following the collapse of the Soviet Union left-wing parties and movements across the West rapidly shifted away from hardline positions. Splits were common and the Worker's Party was not unaffected, seeing a major split occur when a major faction of the party left to form Democratic Left, a Democratic socialist party as opposed to the Marxist-Leninist stance of the Worker's Party. O'Hagan remained a hardliner and viewed the split as a "Betrayal", and desperately tried to hold the fragments of the Worker's Party together as it dwindled. He lashed out the emergence of New Labour in the United Kingdom, which saw the Labour Party move away from Socialist policies towards a version of Social Democracy.