It is a strange feature of the British press that every serious mainstream broadsheet daily newspaper is owned by a foreigner, except one. In what other country would this be allowed to happen? Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and Sir Anthony O'Reilly - owners, respectively, of the Times, the Telegraph and the Independent - have writhed inventively to adapt nationalities to suit their commercial or social convenience.
But neither ermine nor knighthood credibly eliminates their origins, and therefore their visceral allegiance, in Australia, Canada and Ireland. If we exclude the Financial Times in its niche, the Guardian, the least nationalistic paper in the British market, is the only British broadsheet. Yet that fact, startling though it may sound, is not the important peculiarity of its ownership.
The Guardian is, in effect, proprietorless. It does have an owner, the Scott Trust. But the connotations of a proprietor are, mercifully, missing. In the public mind, "proprietor", applied to a newspaper, tends to summon up epithets like grasping, controlling, possessive, tyrannical and politically intrusive. Why own a newspaper if not to satisfy one or more of those instincts? But the Scott Trust was set up to exhibit none of them, and has retained its innocence for more than 60 years.
It's a pretty astonishing story, which began with the heirs of the most celebrated British editor of the 20th century, C. P. Scott, who was owner-editor for 50 years, but whose family was afflicted by multiple deaths in an unnaturally short period in the 1920s and 30s. One more death, and there was real danger that inheritance tax would swallow up the Manchester Guardian.
A combination of pragmatism and generosity - the hard head and high-flown heart typical of a northern Liberal tribe - induced the Scotts to surrender all financial interest in the Guardian and the Manchester Evening News into the trust that has owned them ever since. They disclaimed an asset that was worth, in today's money, at least £10 million.
For many years, all the same, it was a shoestring operation. The Manchester Guardian survived mainly on the profits of the Evening News, all of which were ploughed back into the business. The business has got much bigger, now expanded by shrewd managers to encompass local papers round Manchester and in Surrey and Berkshire, the Autotrader car magazine, and growing interests in commercial radio.
The turnover of the Guardian Media Group last year was almost £440 million. But the trust structure continues to mean that the profits all come back. There are almost no other shareholders. There's no stock market requiring to be soothed or stimulated. Although, in their separate parts, the businesses are conventionally commercial, the whole has a different purpose: to enable the Guardian, now joined by the Observer, to flourish in perpetuity.
This is a wonderful platform from which to pursue the tasks and calling of independent journalism. How and why does it work? I think there are three elements, which have grown out of the Scott family's founding act.
First, the trust has always been a self-denying owner. In earlier days, one of its members said it only needed to meet when something was going wrong. It was an almost sleeping partner, in a business that uneasily survived both the bad times and the better ones of the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, as the business grew, ownership became more responsible, and the trust got closer to strategic decision-making. But GMG is a plc, with its own management structure and board. It does not need to be second-guessed.
These are, moreover, connected bodies. The trust doesn't sit in lofty isolation, but includes the chief executive of GMG, Bob Phillis, the non-executive chairman, Paul Myners, and the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger.
There are outside trustees, including two descendants of C. P. Scott.
The trust, ultimately, could stop the board making a big decision, and can also make its own decisions, as it did when the Observer was bought in 1993. But there is no rivalry. Any residue there might have been from the old pull of family ownership disappeared decades ago. As well as being self-denying, the trust is self-perpetuating. Vacancies are filled by unanimous vote of the existing members: a useful guarantee of continuity.
The trust deed enjoins trustees only to supervise the business in the same spirit "as heretofore". There could not be a more liberal remit.
Second, managers and executives operate an interesting marriage between two cultures. On the one hand, they are commercial, as they have to be. There's not much point in owning Autotrader unless it is successful which, to an astonishing degree, it is. The Guardian and Observer, though they're the stated raison d'Ωtre of the trust, are run with a keen eye to profit. They are in no way charity cases, as their market competitors would be the first to recognise.
But they're protected, in the end, from short-term pressures. The jewel in the business cannot be allowed to lose its shine. The company thus does something to disprove the theory of capitalism that reached its apogee during the Thatcher years, which insisted that only survival in a Darwinian jungle guaranteed economic success. GMG is now a prosperous company, but has got there in defiance of Thatcherite axioms.
The Scott Trust is enjoined to advance subtler purposes, which people in all the businesses seem to understand.
This illuminates the third, most vital element of the trust's success, which is the deep belief of its founders in the value of journalism. They were prepared to sacrifice their inheritance to guarantee the paper's future. To them the newspaper was everything, mere profit nothing more than a means to its constant improvement. Sustaining the same spirit is the chief task of all the original Scotts' successors. The journalism has to come first: anything else would be a betrayal.
What that has meant is giving a primacy to editors that no other Fleet Street paper contemplates. The editor of the Guardian is obliged to be the most responsible editor of all. He has no alibi for mistakes, no proprietor he can blame for an attitude his readers may not like. He is, in a way, entirely alone, except for the colleagues around him on the editorial floor. The trust appoints him, though not often: Alan Rusbridger's predecessor but one, Alastair Hetherington, started the job before Suez in 1956. But then he's on his own.
I've often thought this must sometimes be burdensome to the editor. The buck always stops with him. But it means that the Guardian and Observer are living and constant experiments in independent journalism. Trustees would no more discuss editorial policy than cut the marketing budget.
Without interference from above, editors and journalists can get on with trying to sort out myriad different truths as they see them. A current proof of their success - the success of a journalistic philosophy fathered by C. P. Scott - has been the markedly greater popularity of the Guardian over any other broadsheet, let alone the tabloids, as measured by gains in market share during the Afghan war.
The trust is fortunate to have owned, in recent times, a growing asset, thanks to the success of the company's managers. It may be harder to protect good newspapers during a recession, though the trust has had plenty of experience of hard times as well.
It should also be said that the collaborative spirit, between owners, managers and journalists, has developed over a long period. History insists on it. It might be harder to invent from scratch.
On the other hand, it is now inextinguishable at the Guardian. All who come to work there somehow submit to these timeless values, of which present trustees are the temporary stewards. Why is this? I suspect that the understanding of what journalism should be about is wider than one might think. Deep down, managers as well as journalists are happier working for a paper that's not distracted from the struggle, forever uncompleted, to try to tell the truth. Owners - greedy shareholders, power-hungry tycoons - are the ones who usually get in the way of doing that properly. Their ambitions produce conflicted agendas, against which the journalism has to fight.
Which is where the trust came in: a model that others might follow.
Hugo Young is a columnist on the Guardian and has been chairman of the Scott Trust since 1990. Full details about the Scott Trust are available on the internet; see www.gmgplc.co.uk/gmg/scotttrust; The Guardian website is www.newsunlimited.co.uk
Tomorrow: Newspapers in America - towards public corporate ownership, transparency and accountability