Abstract

"No Mere Capitalist Business: Forging a Nationalised British Coal Industry"

Andrew Perchard, University of Wolverhampton (A.Perchard@wlv.ac.uk), Keith Gildart, University of Wolverhampton (Keith.Gildart@wlv.ac.uk)

When Britain’s coal industry was nationalised in 1947 by the first post-war Labour government, it created the largest socialised industry outside of the Communist bloc; taking on responsibility for managing 1,400 mines with a workforce numbering 695,000, inherited from 800 separate firms and individuals. However, despite an abundance of tracts talking about the nationalisation of coal, when it came to establishing the structure and governance of the National Coal Board no specific plans existed. The closest template, Socialisation and Transport (1933), was one published by Lord President Herbert Morrison based on his experience as Minister of Transport in Britain’s second Labour government (1929-31) in which he envisaged that the public corporation should be ‘no mere capitalist business’ but should, ‘promote the maximum of public well-being and the status, dignity, knowledge and freedom of the workers by hand and brain employed in the undertaking’ (pp.133, 145). This subsequently informed both his formation of the London Passenger Transport Board and subsequently Labour’s post-war nationalisation programme. In the end, the form which coal nationalisation took reflected a number of different influences, which were more pragmatic than ideological in nature. Drawing on research from a three-year large scale project, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC AH/P007244/1) (2017-20), exploring the nationalised British coal industry from the perspective of the different coalfields and their traditions, this paper will examine the particular social and political responses that shaped the form of public ownership of Britain’s coal industry and the implications of that for such a complex and diverse industry against the changing backdrop of energy and industrial policy and industrial relations.