The 1940s Nationalizations in Britain: Means to an End or the Means of Production?
r o account for the nationalizations of the 1940s is to explain the timing, incidence, and form of the measures.' Few accounts meet those standards and our understanding of the causes of the nationalization programme is, as Morgan said of the historiography of the whole of the Attlee administration, 'in grave danger of retreating from reality into the half world of legend and fantasy'.2 Some explanations are so generalfor example, that nationalization was the central manifestation of a socialist policy-that they cannot explain its incidence across industries. Other accounts, including some in my own recent work, have been open to the objection that the explanations lack any general theme, with the fortune of each industry determined by factors specific to that industry.3 So far as incidence is concerned, the shift to public ownership was concentrated in the fuel and transport industries, a pattern that changed little until the 1980s. Cairncross depicts the nationalizations as the centrepiece of the socialist vision, an inevitable outcome of long-standing debates within the Labour Party and of its rise to power.4 Why, however, should the socialist vision be restricted to transport and fuel? Why should the 'means of production' not include the machinery and other capital assets in manufacturing, construction, commerce, and agriculture, let alone the original indestructible capital in land? The idea that trade unions had a pervasive influence is also something of a myth. While the mining union played an important role in the establishment of the