Great Britain: England and Wales, and Scotland

Abstract

One of the most contentious political issues in the United Kingdom in the second half of the twentieth century was the relationship between individual citizens and the state. In the years immediately following the Second World War a consensus emerged between the main political parties on the role of the state as a provider to citizens of a range of goods and services — particularly those associated with the utility industries — in order to achieve specific distributional ends.¹ By the mid-1970s, however, doubts were being raised by leading politicians² about the efficacy of public corporations in meeting redistributive or other social obligations, and the consensus began to break down. The 1979 election, of a Conservative administration committed to changing the relationship between the citizen and the state marked the beginning of a period in which alternatives to the public sector provision of goods and services were explored. A technically challenging and politically ambitious privatization programme followed, in which many nationalized industries, including some but not all of the utilities (previously considered the exclusive preserve of the state), were restructured, divested of particular social obligations, given clearer economic objectives, made subject to new forms of economic regulation, and sold to private sector investors.³