Any other business: Have you wondered why there’s only one John Lewis Partnership, Mr Clegg?

‘A John Lewis economy’ was a strong soundbite from Nick Clegg, even if it failed to resonate with Netto shoppers lower down the social scale than the Cleggs. The Deputy Prime Minister is ‘pushing for real, early, radical action’ to make this ‘the decade of employee share ownership’, and no one can deny he’s picked a potent theme at a time when conventional capitalism seems hellbent on self-destruction. But having bagged a headline, he should pause to ask himself this: if John Spedan Lewis invented such a brilliant business model — which he did — then how come it hasn’t been copied again and again?

There are only a handful of enduring large-scale employee-owned businesses in Britain. After the Lewis-Waitrose combo the most celebrated is Unipart, the car component supplier that is 70 per cent owned by its workforce and pension fund, with sympathetic institutions holding the rest. Formerly the spare parts arm of British Leyland, it has been led since its 1987 buyout by one man, John Neill; what makes it tick, besides the commitment that comes with ownership, is a philosophy that Neill calls ‘the Unipart Way’, all about empowerment and self-improvement. It sounds cult-like but it works — and the Unipart model has often been held up as an alternative to full-­blooded privatisation for troublesome parts of the public sector such as Royal Mail.

Less well known is the Scott Bader Commonwealth, a multinational chemical firm  headquartered in Northamptonshire and employing 560 people. Its founder, Ernest Bader, placed the company in the ‘common trusteeship’ of its workforce in 1951, and they continue to uphold his Quaker-­influenced principles. Inspiration and Reality, the late Robert Oakeshott’s history of Scott Bader’s first 50 years, identified the compromises that come with such high-mindedness: how the inability to bring in outside capital limits investment in new projects, while unusually generous employment terms squeeze profit margins.