Great Britain's giant nationalized industries pose unprecedented problems for a free nation. Are the old governmental forms appropriate? Can the new forms be held accountable to the public? Can public accountability and business efficiency be reconciled? The five key industries, formed out of thousands of former enterprises, employ almost two million workers—almost three times the number of civil servants. Even the strictly “business” problems are unprecedented. In personnel, the transport industry is double the size of American Telephone and Telegraph. Coal is three times the size of General Motors. Admitting that the final answers on accountability had not been found, Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of the Council, well stated the prevailing British attitude: “We are in the early years of novel constitutional and social experiments of great long-term significance, and we can be certain that as experience grows the methods which are in use at present will need to be modified and additional methods will be evolved.”

Public accountability is precisely what distinguishes a nationalized industry from a private industry; but it is now obvious to all in Great Britain, if there was ever any doubt about it, that public accountability is not an automatic consequence of nationalization. The politicial scientist and the economist may argue about whether the approximation of identity of interests is more likely to be found between government and citizen or between producer and consumer; but there is impressive evidence that in the former relationship, at least, perception of such interest and consequent adjustment toward identity call for special machinery. Ultimately, accountability depends on Parliamentary control, but this is a cumbersome and imprecise weapon of last resort. It was to be expected, therefore, that the authors of nationalization in Great Britain should supplement this ultimate control with other devices, both internal and external. To the administrative desirability of such a step was added the economic need. Here were vast state monopolies — no competition and no “consumer sovereignty.” How could they be kept clearly answerable to the public, not merely in the ultimate sense but also in daily awareness of the public interest? Whatever the Labour government may have thought of the economic arguments, many of which attributed much more “responsibility” to the pre-nationalized industries than could be substantiated, it did make statutory provisions for a consumers' council, or system of councils, in each of the nationalized undertakings. These were to supplement the other control devices. These were to lift the voice of the consumer — not just at election time but in day-to-day recognition of the fact that, in Aristotle's metaphor, “The guest will judge better of a feast than the cook.”