Ages of Reform

Kenneth Morgan is one of the most distinguished political historians of modern Britain. The present title brings together a number of his essays from the past four decades in a volume of powerful and engaging scholarship, exploring the ideas, institutions, and personalities that have shaped the British left over the past two centuries. The volume is divided into two parts, the first dealing with Victorian and Edwardian Liberals, and the second with the Labour Party during the twentieth century. In terms of the personalities, the focus is on practical politicians and statesmen rather than theorists and philosophers. The heroes of Liberalism (and they are clearly presented in a heroic light) are Gladstone and Lloyd George, rather than J.S. Mill or J.A. Hobson—a reaction, perhaps, against the ‘high-minded, elitist distaste for power’ (p. xi) which Morgan believes has often characterised the Liberal left’s attitude towards its own history. Big personalities feature prominently, too, in his survey of the Labour years. But there are also more conceptually-driven chapters here, including a nuanced and perceptive survey of the shifting meanings of ‘socialism’ in a British context, and detailed studies of specific ideas and policies that have, at various times and in varying degrees, influenced the agenda of the left: republicanism (Labour’s ‘dog that did not bark’); planning, equality, modernisation, and permissiveness in the context of ‘sixties socialism’; and nationalisation—a policy which appeared inseparable from the socialist idea in Britain for the half-century between the foundation of the ILP and the formation of the Attlee government, but which declined rapidly in importance and appeal thereafter: effectively disappearing from Labour’s programme by the 1980s, before re-emerging unexpectedly in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08, when the Labour government (with conspicuous reluctance) took the Northern Rock bank into public ownership

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