ABSTRACT
In 1964, the then leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, introduced his remarks about the distinctiveness of British socialism with some observations on the role of religion:
It was the late Secretary of the Labour Party, Mr Morgan Phillips, who said that Socialism in Britain owed far more to Methodism than to Marx. If he has forgotten his alliteration and said ‘Nonconformity’, he would have been very near the truth, though that would have been to underrate the great contributions to nineteenth-century socialist thinking of such Anglicans as Charles Kingsley and Charles Gore.1
