The Labour peer and historian Kenneth Morgan is perhaps best known for his accounts of the Attlee government, Labour in Power, and the Lloyd George coalition, Consensus and Disunity, a work of considerable relevance for anyone seeking to understand the Cameron government. But his biographies of Callaghan and Foot have caused him to be labelled the Annigoni of Old Labour, his critics arguing that he covered over their warts with a pail of whitewash. Ages of Reform is a collection of Morgan’s shorter pieces, most of them already published, but in out-of-the-way places. They are well worth preserving in book form. Their central theme is the evolutionary and beneficent progress of the left in Britain — first the Liberals, then Labour — since 1832.
The first piece is on the Great Reform Act of 1832. By depriving the landed interest of its monopoly of political power, reform helped to define the character not only of the British state but also of the British left. The Act reinforced the supremacy and centrality of Parliament in Britain’s constitutional arrangements. It is easy to understand why the radical left in Britain, from the time of the Chartists through the age of Keir Hardie to the era of Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot, remained so attached to parliamentary methods. Ralph Miliband mounted a vigorous attack on this tradition in his book, Parliamentary Socialism, published in 1961, but his sons, David and Ed, rigorously adhere to it. The most revolutionary force in the world, Bevan used to insist, is parliamentary democracy.
Ages of Reform provides what is in essence a left-wing version of Our Island Story, in which its heroes appear in somewhat sanitised garb. Lloyd George takes his place as a social reformer. His flirtation with Hitler is mentioned, but the sinister and corrupt Lloyd George of the Black and Tans and the sale of honours is underplayed. Nye Bevan is presented as founder of the National Health Service, not as the left-wing activist who pressed the National Government in the 1930s to disarm in the face of Hitler. Michael Foot appears as a saintly and somewhat unworldly libertarian, rather than the minister who gave the trade unions a stranglehold over Britain in the 1970s and legislated for a closed shop in journalism, the greatest attack on freedom of expression in Britain since the war. The horrors of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79, with the dead unburied in Liverpool, cancer patients sent home, and a strike at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for children, are minimised.
Morgan perceives an essential continuity between Labour and the post-Gladstonian Liberal party. Labour, however, was a specifically doctrinal party, and indeed Morgan detects no fewer than seven ages of socialism since the time of Keir Hardie. But he is no more successful than anyone else in telling us what meaning, if any, socialism has today. He complains that ‘there has been no significant statement of socialist doctrine in this country — perhaps in any country — since Crosland in the mid-1950s’, so echoing Tawney and Tony Benn, both of whom complained that the Labour party suffers from lacking a teacher.
Between Keir Hardie and Crosland, however, a fundamental change had occurred in the socialist argument. The founding fathers of the Labour party had urged a transformation of society. They wanted to create a new and different kind of society based on the principle of fraternity rather than competition. By the time of Crosland that aim had been abandoned. Socialists now sought, not a new society, but an amelioriation of capitalism. Under New Labour, even that possibility appeared to be severely constrained by the pressures of globalisation, and Labour had come to be led by someone whom Morgan regards as avowedly non-socialist, Tony Blair. Not only, therefore, is there a basic discontinuity in socialist thought, but while, at the beginning of the 20th century, socialism had appeared a creed of the future, by its end it seemed a relic of the past. Why? Morgan is too committed and too much part of the socialist tradition to ask, let alone answer, this question.
Morgan’s title, Ages of Reform, is intended as homage to the great American historian Richard Hofstadter, who in 1955 published a Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Age of Reform, on the contradictions of the American left from the Populists to the New Deal. Yet, whereas Hofstadter was concerned to draw out the contradictions and difficulties in the progressive tradition in America, Morgan prefers uplift. But what the left needs today is self-criticism rather than celebration.