Were Chartists the basis for the Labour Party or was the gap between the two movements too great to draw any significant connections?
As I understand it the Chartists were subsumed by the Liberal Party and there is a good gap in time between the end of the Chartist movement and the founding of the labour party. So I guess what I am most interested in is if historians draw a direct connections between Chartism and Labour.
Chartism was about representation, specifically the failure of the 'Great Reform Act' of 1832 to extend the franchise to the working class, with other demands such as payment for MPs. The franchise was extended in 1867 - the Chartist movement had already wilted by then. Chartism was a movement with roots in Liberalism. The Labour Party and Keir Hardie's ILP were explicitly socialist in those early days, they were more concerned with things like worker's rights, by this time the franchise was not a hot issue. They did agitate for the completion of the remaining parts of the Chartist agenda, notably salaries for MPs to allow working class people to become professional politicians. In short, I would say that the time gap is much too great to link the Chartists to the creation of the Labour party, and that the concerns of Chartism were inherently different due to the nature of the periods in which the two movements existed.
Your go-to sources would be Thompson 'The Making of the English Working-Class', which is exactly about this sort of thing, and Hobsbawm's 'Age of...' books, which talk a lot about social movements in the UK, and in their wider European context. He focuses on the working class and especially the role of poverty in driving of Chartism, and would see more of a continuity between the movements.
Edits for clarity