Epilogue

In 1963 the Scottish Boards could look with a greater confidence than they had felt for some time towards their future. In England and Wales, too, the engineers and managers in the electricity supply industry could view their future optimistically, as they surveyed past achievements and recent changes on the fifteenth anniversary of nationalisation, 1 April 1963. Nor was this purely bloated pride. In February 1963, their senior men had finished a gruelling period of intermittent examination over more than a year before the Commons Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, which for the first time was showing its teeth seriously.2 The Committee’s report, published in May of that year, was generally complimentary about the industry’s achievements, and gave support to the general direction of policy on which they were embarked, even supporting the industry’s views against that of Ministers on some issues where the two differed.3 The industry’s presentations to the Committee had been an accomplished public relations achievement in the best sense of the word: they did not skate over difficult issues, but confronted them logically, so that their doubts and hesitations could be shared and their priorities rationally appraised.4