Abstract
Although the economy was comprehensively controlled by the government, the Second World War saw little change in the extension of state ownership to business undertakings. Political opinion had not yet shifted in favour of such a course, which would have involved political and administrative upheavals that would have been an indefensible distraction from the war effort. Only to a very small degree and in very special circumstances were state-owned businesses set up and nearly all of them were intended to last only through the temporary emergency of a few years. Suggestions that the Air Ministry (and later the Ministry of Aircraft Production) should have its own aircraft factories, on the analogy of the Royal Dockyards and Royal Ordnance Factories, were discussed just before the war and in its early phases, and always turned down.1 Only two extensions of state ownership had much lasting significance and both were on a fairly small scale.
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Chapter Notes
W. Ashworth, Contracts and Finance (History of the Second World War, UK Civil Series) (London, 1953) pp. 220–1.
D. N. Chester, The Nationalisation of British Industry 1945–51 (London, 1975) pp. 142–3.
H. A. Clegg and D. N. Chester, ‘The North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board’, Public Administration, XXXI (1953) pp. 213–34 reviews the early history.
P. L. Payne, The Hydro (Aberdeen, 1988) gives a full account of both the origins and later activities of the Board.
Ibid., pp. 91–104, 240–58, 388–91; B. Supple, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 4 (Oxford, 1987) pp. 628–65;
W. Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 5, 1946–1982 (Oxford, 1986) pp. 20–36, 121–30. For the nationalisation of the non-mining activities, see Ashworth, British Coal Industry, Vol. 5, pp. 471–80, 486–8, 508; for the changes in the organisation of opencast mining, see ibid., pp. 449–51. For the number of mines owned by the NCB and the licensing of private mines, see ibid., pp. 6, 24, 158–9; Supple, British Coal Industry, Vol. 4, pp. 636, 673–4 is slightly inaccurate on this subject.
Ibid., pp. 106–39, 261–77, 391–405, 665–77; P. S. Bagwell, The Transport Revolution from 1770 (London, 1974) pp. 305–10;
T. R. Gourvish, British Railways 1948–73 (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 24–8.
R. Keif-Cohen, British Nationalisation 1945–1973 (London, 1973) pp. 94–6.
G. L. Reid, K. Allen and D. J. Harris, The Nationalized Fuel Industries (London, 1973) pp. 170–1; Keif-Cohen, British Nationalisation, pp. 40–1, 44–7.
L. Hannah, Engineers, Managers and Politicians: The First Fifteen Years of Nationalised Electricity Supply in Britain (London, 1982) pp. 171–6.
D. H. Aldcroft, British Transport since 1914 (Newton Abbot, 1975) pp. 269–82.
Ashworth, British Coal Industry, Vol. 5, pp. 496–9; P. Johnson (ed.), The Structure of British Industry (London, 2nd edn, 1988) ch. 2.
Bank of Scotland, United Kingdom Taxation: Offshore Oil and Gas (Edinburgh, 1976) pp. 2, 4–9, 19.
Keif-Cohen, British Nationalisation, pp. 108–9; J. Kay, C. Mayer and D. Thompson (eds), Privatisation and Regulation — the UK Experience (Oxford, 1986) pp. 224–5, 232–7.
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© 1991 William Ashworth
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Ashworth, W. (1991). The Sequence of Nationalisation. In: The State in Business 1945 to the mid-1980s. Modern Economy and Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21529-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21529-4_2
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