The Bank of England should be real public property. At the moment it's real status is very elusive. From my research it is registered as a private limited company but with only one share, of course that share might be sub-divided, who knows? The government is very shady about who really owns the bank of England.

The Banking system should be much better regulated. At the moment, banks can, more or less, do as they please.

With real and transparent publicly issued currency, along with tight controls on interest rates, money supply and limits on what high streets can do in terms of fractional reserves and interest rates, it is possible to avoid these economic boom and bust cycles.

Of course, these suggestions are not ideal, but as a transitional stage would be realistic.

... worked fine when they were in public ownership

Can be nationalized --- anything and everything depending on how many people you are willing to kill to accomplish that and have the necessary resources to win the fight instead of being wiped out yourself. What I really meant is that you can nationalize whatever you can convince enough people should be nationalized.

Now for my questions:

a) WHY are you equating "public ownership" (as opposed to "privately owned") with "nationalized"? Did you mean to be including in your vision of communal ownership that this always be at the national level as opposed to more local level? That the only form of socialism/communism you consider legitimate is at the STATE level? You would consider local collectives, co-ops, communes, etc. to be a form of private ownership?

b) Britain currently doesn't allow for "public" banks? (like our "co-operative banks" or our "credit unions" which are "owned" by their depositors). Yes I understand, probably in all lines of endeavor the collective forms of ownership may be rare. But they are allowed, yes? I will note however that once very large and successful often such institutions can be hard to distinguish from the privately owned >

Your article should be entitled "What can and can't be privatised, and I can't be bothered explaining why".

It's not news.

This is a newswire. Stop clogging it up with tripe.