The fundamentals of public ownership: learning from UK historical experience and recent Scottish policy

Gibbs, E. , McCartney, G. and Phillips, J. (2024) The fundamentals of public ownership: learning from UK historical experience and recent Scottish policy. Political Quarterly, (doi: 10.1111/1467-923X.13348) (Early Online Publication)

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Keywords: Public ownership, nationalisation, privatisation, fair work, economic democracy.
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: McCartney, Professor Gerard and Phillips, Professor Jim and Gibbs, Dr Ewan
• Authors: Gibbs, E., McCartney, G., and Phillips, J.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Economic and Social History; College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Sociology Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences
• Journal Name: Political Quarterly
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISSN: 0032-3179
• ISSN (Online): 1467-923X
• Published Online: 10 January 2024
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2024 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Political Quarterly 2024
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons license