Gas: Under the Gas Act of 1948 the gas industry was brought under public ownership and control on May 1, 1949. The national body is the Gas Council, also appointed by the Minister of Fuel and Power. The council consists of a full-time chairman and deputy chairman and the twelve chairmen of the area boards.
Electricity: The Central Electricity Authority in April 1948 took over the assets of former municipal and private electricity supply systems throughout Great Britain with the exception of the area already served by the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, another public corporation. But the industry had long been moving toward nationalization. As early as 1919 the Electricity Commissioners were established to supervise the industry and promote voluntary reorganization. The industry is a big one, employing approximately 200,000 people, and production in 1954 was over 72,800,000,000 kilowatts.
Banking: The Bank of England, Britain's central bank, was established in 1694 by Act of Parliament. Its entire capital stock was acquired by the government under the Bank of England Act of 1946. As the central bank, the Bank of England is the banker to the government, its agent in important financial operations, and the central note-issuing authority.
Transport: On January 1, 1948, under the Transport Act passed in the preceding year, most of Britain's inland transport system came under public ownership. Nationalization embraced the railways and the hotels, road-transport interests, docks and steamships owned by the railways, most of the canals, and London's passenger-transport system. The public authority then established was the British Transport Commission. Originally the Commission appointed six executive bodies to run various parts of the system: the Railway Executive, the Road Transport Executive, the Road Passenger Executive, the Hotel Executive, the London Transport Executive, and the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive. This generous proliferation of authority affected an industry that employs nearly 2,000,000 workers.
Transport was one of the nationalized industries whose organization was altered by the Conservatives when they returned to power in 1951. Believing that "competition gives a better service than monopoly," the Tories passed the Transport Act of 1953. This returned highway freight-haulage to private enterprise and aimed at greater efficiency on the railroads through the encouragement of competition between the various regions, such as the Southern Region or the Western Region, into which the national system had been divided. The act also abolished all the neat but rather inefficient executives except the Road Passenger Executive, which had been abolished, unmourned save by a few civil servants, in 1952, and the London Transport Executive, which was retained.
Airways: British governments since the twenties have been involved in civil aviation. Imperial Airways received a government grant of £1,000,000 as early as 1924. By 1939 the Conservative government had established the British Overseas Airways Corporation by Act of Parliament. In 1946 the Labor government, under the Civil Aviation Act, set up two additional public corporations: British European Airways and British South American Airways. The latter was merged with BOAC in 1949.
Communications: The government took control of Cable and Wireless Ltd., the principal overseas telegraph service, on January 1, 1947. Thus, the Post Office now operates overseas telecommunications from the United Kingdom and, of course, all internal telephonic and telegraphic systems.
These were the most important milestones on the Labor Party's progress toward nationalization. Viewed dispassionately, they were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There had been a trend toward nationalization in electricity for some years. Objective investigators had suggested nationalization to aid the failing coal-mining industry, and during the war (1942) the Coalition government had assumed full control of the industry's operations although private ownership retained control of the mines.
We should avoid, too, the impression, popular among the uninformed in the United States and even in Britain, that nationalization meant that the workers took over management of the industries concerned. There was no invasion of boardrooms by working-men in cloth caps. On the contrary, employees protested that nationalization did not affect the management of industries, and such protests were backed by facts. In 1951, after six years of Labor Party rule, trade-union representation among the full-time members of the boards of the nationalized industries was a little under 20 per cent, and among the part-time members the percentage was just below 15 per cent. Five boards had no trade-union representation.