INTRODUCTION
‘The company’, argued Gower and Davies: Principles of Modern Company Law in 2003, ‘is a dominant institution in our society, and all the more so with the retreat in recent decades of the government-owned or public sector of the economy’. To the extent that this was true, ‘the company’ has been a spectacular failure. Environmentally, since 1979, the year the UK government sold most of BP, carbon dioxide in our air rose from 336 parts per million (up from 285 ppm, pre-1780) to 424 ppm in 2024, heating the planet over 1.5°C. Just 90 corporate entities are responsible for 63% of historic emissions, and globally BP alone accounts for around six times the UK’s annual emissions. Economically, since 2010, as the state favoured private capital over labour more than ever, British workers stopped getting any gains from growth or productivity …
Ewan McGaughey, Enterprise law and the eclipse of corporate law, King’s Law Journal. Published online: 11 December 2024.
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