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> it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder. ...isn't that PR China's business-model: state-capitalism?

• amiga386 2y ago
  It's the other way around here; the Post Office is effectively a government department, cosplaying as a commercial business. It has never posted a profit. It's up to the government to bail it out, every time. It's controlled at arms length by a body called UK Government Investments (UKGI) who crack the whip at it and try to ensure "value for the taxpayer". The rest of the UK government is capitalism on stilts, and is forever outsourcing everything to the private sector. There was a scandal when the outsourcing firm Carillion went bankrupt - we learned that the cleaners in Parliament were under four layers of subcontracting - i.e. four sets of middlemen taking a cut between the government paying for cleaning Parliament and the people who actually do the cleaning. One of those middlemen was Carillion, which had just paid £79m of dividends to investors and then collapsed with £7000m in liabilities and £29m cash. That's because capitalism is perfectly efficient, and it's not just a bunch of crooks cooking the books to appear to be perfectly efficient, right?