In a country where almost every major utility, transport system, and critical infrastructure asset has been sold, privatised, or carved up by overseas investors, one anomaly remains: Manchester Airports Group.
MAG — owner of Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports — is not a private equity trophy or a sovereign wealth fund purchase. It is majority-owned by ten Greater Manchester local authorities, with Manchester City Council holding the largest share.
That makes MAG the closest thing modern Britain has to a municipal business empire.
Depending on who you ask, this makes it either:
- a shining example of public ownership done right, or
- a leftover from a pre-privatisation era that should have died decades ago.
The truth, as ever, sits somewhere more interesting.
1. MAG shouldn’t exist — and yet it thrives
To understand MAG, you have to understand what the UK used to be.
Until the 1980s, it was normal for local authorities to own:
- airports
- electricity boards
- water utilities
- bus companies
- housing corporations
- ports
Most English cities once had commercial assets designed to generate income for local services. All of that was swept away by waves of privatisation, consolidation, and centralisation.
Manchester, unusually, didn’t sell its airport.
That single act of inertia — or vision, depending on your politics — means the region now owns a multi-billion-pound international airport operator in an age where everything else of value is in private hands.
MAG is not an ideological outlier. It is a survivor.
2. A socialist relic? Only if success counts as socialism
Critics of public ownership argue that councils running commercial enterprises is outdated and amateurish — at worst “municipal socialism”, at best a quaint mid-century habit.
But MAG has:
- grown into the UK’s largest domestic-owned airport group
- acquired and run London Stansted successfully
- paid substantial dividends to Manchester’s councils
- operated commercially without relying on taxpayer subsidy
- outperformed some privately owned airports
- delivered modernisation projects worth billions
It behaves like a private company because it is structured like one — except the profits flow to councils, not shareholders in Dubai, Ontario, or Sydney.
If this is a “socialist relic”, it is one that:
- makes money
- funds public services
- retains regional control
- attracts global carriers
- competes in the open market
Critics have to choose: either public ownership is inherently inefficient, or MAG exists.
Both cannot be true.
3. A jewel in the crown? Maybe — but it’s an accidental jewel
Supporters of MAG often talk like its success was inevitable. It wasn’t.
MAG survived for three key reasons:
(1) Manchester refused to privatise at the height of the sell-off boom
This wasn’t purely ideological boldness — it was partly political stubbornness and partly an unwillingness to give up a consistent revenue source.
(2) Aviation is one of the few industries where scale matters
By collecting Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands under one group, MAG gained operational leverage, pricing power, and diversification.
(3) MAG embraced commercialisation early
While many public bodies sleepwalked through the 1990s, MAG behaved like a business: property development, parking revenue, retail partnerships, long-term airline agreements, route development incentives.
If MAG had stayed “a council department”, it would have died years ago.
Instead, it became something far rarer: a public asset that actually pays its way.
4. The tension: public ownership with private expectations
MAG sits in a strange position in British political culture:
- The right dislikes that councils own airports.
- The left dislikes that MAG behaves like a corporation.
- The centre barely understands how it exists at all.
This tension is precisely why MAG is fascinating. It forces a blunt question:
Is Britain’s problem public ownership — or the fact that most public ownership is badly structured?
MAG shows that public ownership can work if:
- the structure is commercial
- the board is competent
- investment is allowed
- political interference is minimal
- leadership thinks long-term
- the asset is strategic, not decorative
It is not socialism. It is not capitalism. It is what Britain used to be very good at: commercial municipalism.
5. The danger: MAG may be too successful to stay public
Every profitable public asset in the UK eventually gets sold — either because central government wants the cash, or because councils facing financial pressure are tempted by a one-off windfall.
MAG is now an £8–£10 billion prize in a world hungry for infrastructure assets:
- pension funds want airports
- sovereign wealth funds want Heathrow-like assets
- private equity wants stable cashflow
- airlines want influence
- global investors want UK infrastructure bargains
MAG isn’t just a jewel in the crown of public ownership. It’s a target.
Selling it would give councils short-term relief. Keeping it gives them a long-term income stream that most regions would kill for.
What happens next depends less on economics and more on political courage.
6. So which is it — jewel or relic?
MAG is neither a triumph of socialism nor an accidental miracle of capitalism.
It is evidence that:
- British public ownership can work
- commercial structure matters more than ideology
- local control can deliver national-scale infrastructure
- not every asset needs to be sold to perform
- privatisation isn’t the only path to efficiency
- public institutions fail because of governance, not because they’re public
MAG is a relic only in the sense that it survived a privatisation era that erased nearly everything like it.
It is a jewel because the model works — and because it proves that Britain once had, and could again have, a public-commercial hybrid sector that produces real value.
Conclusion: The last great municipally owned empire — and a test Britain keeps failing
Manchester Airports Group tells a story Britain rarely confronts:
We sold everything — and it turns out the things we kept were the ones that worked.
MAG is not an ideological relic. It is not proof that councils should run supermarkets. It is not an argument for nationalising British Airways.
It is evidence that Britain’s debate about public vs private ownership has been framed incorrectly for forty years.
The real question is not:
“Should the state own things?”
but
“When the state does own something, why doesn’t it look like MAG?”