The Fundamentals of Public Ownership: Learning from UK Historical Experience and Recent Scottish Policy

Abstract

Public ownership has emerged as desirable and achievable in the United Kingdom in the 2020s. The ongoing water crisis in England and concerns about ‘greedflation’ in sectors such as electricity and gas following recent price rises have encouraged interest in public ownership. Informed discussion is compromised, however, by a gap in public knowledge. This partly stems from the distance of time, a generation or more, since publicly owned enterprises operated in these sectors across Britain. We argue that public ownership is best understood in terms of fundamentals. Our proposed typology presents the predominant form of public ownership, nationalisation, as a response to fundamental problems, or devised as more efficient management of fundamental sectors, or established to achieve fundamental citizenship values. The typology is developed in dialogue with historical British experiences, then applied to contemporary examples of Scottish government policy, namely shipbuilding, social care and railways.