Can Common Ownership Meet the Challenge?

Abstract

The argument advanced so far is that there are significant areas of conflict underlying effective industrial policy, and that there are no panaceas which will enable them to be overcome without difficulty. This fact may appear obvious — yet it has rarely been explicitly recognised in political dialogues on industrial policy. Once it has been accepted, the role of public ownership can be considered from a different standpoint. Supporters of nationalisation must demonstrate how a transfer of ownership can help to cope with this conflict. The proposition developed in the remainder of this book is that the elimination of private ownership, while not in itself offering a complete answer to all industrial problems, is necessary to give the Government the tools with which to achieve its policy objectives.

This island is too small, its economic life too precariously balanced, its geographical situation too vulnerable, for its fate to be left to the casual workings of chance or the insatiable unheeding drive of the profit-makers. Jarrow is an object lesson in what happens then. The profiteers having ravaged a town or a country can take themselves and their gains elsewhere. The workers have the main stake in their homeland, for in it they must remain. [Ellen Wilkinson, The Town that was Murdered]