Abstract
ALTHOUGH, as Mr. Wilfred Roberts did well to remind the House of Commons in the debate on nationalized industries on March 3, the public corporation is no new feature of the social and political life of Great Britain, public concern about the efficiency and accountability of such bodies has steadily grown with the execution of the Government‘s programme of nationalization. The debate on March 3, which was concerned mainly with the extent to which ministers could be held responsible and questioned in Parliament concerning the activities of such bodies, followed up an earlier debate in the House of Lords on December 2 on the problems of nationalized industry. Both Mr. H. R. G. Greaves in his recent book "The Civil Service in the Changing State", and Sir John Anderson in his Romanes Lecture on "The Machinery of Government" have considered some of the fundamental problems involved in this newer type of government organisation, and there have already been published at least two critical full-length appreciations of British experience in this field-notably the study of "Public Enterprise" edited by Dr. W. A. Robson in 1937, and Mr. T. H. O‘Brien‘s book "British Experiments in Public Ownership and Control" of the same year.
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Responsibility in Nationalized Industries. Nature 161, 619–621 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161619a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161619a0