12 - The political economy of nationalisation: the electricity industry

Summary

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

These closing lines of Keynes's General Theory, published in February 1936, provide a neat summary of the main theme of this chapter on the long prelude to the nationalisation of the electricity industry in April 1948. The decision of the Attlee government to transfer the industry from municipal and private hands into public ownership was a last exasperated, culminating conclusion to a prolonged struggle to effect the reorganisation of the structure of the industry, in particular on its distribution side. The oft-made remark that the nationalisation programme contained few long-considered practical proposals for the management of the newly nationalised industries is largely correct, and also, not that surprising, if the nationalisation programme is viewed as the end of a long process rather than the initiation of a new one. Similarly, the observation that nationalisation grouped together a motley and sometimes inconsistent collection of ideas, aims and aspirations reflects its origins.