Does a British government have the moral and legal right to sell
off industries and property owned by the state? In Britain the
answer m is that it can legally do so. Barring restrictions
agreed to in treaties, most particularly the Treaty of Rome and
its successor treaties, a British government may legally do what
it wishes. It may also repudiate existing treaty obligations.
Parliament may in principle pass any law it wishes. That
demonstrates the danger of having a political system without any
constitutional bars to government action. But if privatisation
is legal, it does not follow that it is morally justified. To
begin with to sell that to which no legal title exists would be
illegal in any circumstance other than the special circumstance
of Parliament passing a law to make it legal. That governments
have no natural; legal ownership of that which is privatized can
be seen from the fact that these are enterprises and property
which were either developed from scratch by government or were
taken over by the