It has been done before

Clement Attlee’s government took office in July 1945, in a country so poor it began rationing bread in 1946, after the war had ended. Debt to GDP ratio was 252%.¹ Inside eighteen months the coal industry was in public hands: more than 900 collieries, 225,000 acres of land and 140,000 miners’ houses transferred in a single morning on the 1st of January 1947. The railways followed a year later. Electricity that April. Gas the year after. 

“By 1951 roughly a fifth of the British economy had changed ownership – carried out by a government fighting a balance of payments crisis, through the worst winter in living memory, with the population eating less than it had before the war.”

²

The scale is the point, and it is the part most often forgotten. Not one industry at a time, carefully, as conditions allowed. Six at once, in the worst peacetime conditions Britain has known. They also found the time to build the NHS and create the welfare state.

Nor is this uniquely British.

The United States in 1933 had a quarter of its workforce out of work. Federal credit built dams, power lines and roads through agencies created to do it. Rural electrification reached farms no private utility would serve, because serving them did not pay. Glass-Steagall separated retail banking from speculation and held for sixty-six years. The assets outlasted the politics. Much of what America runs on today was paid for by a state that decided it could.

Modern China is the recent case, and it is worth separating the finance from everything else about it. Over three decades it built the largest infrastructure programme in history, financed largely through state credit rather than international bond markets. High-speed rail, grid, ports, housing, renewables. The constraint was never the money. It was steel, concrete and skilled people, and China acquired all three. Whatever else is true of that state, the physical record is not in dispute.

China’s failure was a privately financed property bubble. Instead of local authorities funding homes people needed, they sold land to developers because that was their main income stream.  Private developers funded a property boom using money buyers paid up front for flats not yet built, and the money was spent on the next site instead of on their flat. Evergrande was a private developer chasing returns on borrowed money, and it collapsed, leaving ghost cities. 

That’s the opposite of this programme, where the state meets a long-term physical need, rather than companies like Evergrande pursuing short-term speculative gains. The Capacity Guardrail is not a promise to be better at spotting a bubble. Credit is matched to a measurable physical shortage – homes, grid capacity, trained engineers – to build real assets. 

None of these governments had powers we lack. What they had was the decision.

This is not about pulling up the drawbridge. Britain will be a major trading nation, with clean energy and modern industrial capacity. Scaling up technologies like sodium-ion and iron-air batteries matures an industry, makes storage cheap and helps the Global South decarbonise. This model is not a zero-sum game. Prosperity comes from building sustainable productive capacity, rather than from commodity exploitation of poorer nations.

“Somebody has to decarbonise first. It might as well be us.”