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Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I ca

Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.

rPlayer6554 11mo ago
Japan’s rail privatization was extremely successful and it’s considered one of the best rail networks in the world now.
ApolloFortyNine 11mo ago
Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1] And they actually continue to expand their service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
- dboreham 11mo ago
  Japan has a culture of running trains on time though. There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service.
  - tjpnz 11mo ago
    And even if there was they couldn't thanks to unions and some of the strongest worker protections in the developed world. That doesn't even touch on the loss of face for proposing such a thing.
    - simgt 11mo ago
      Is it really their recipe for greatness? We have very strong unions and worker protections in France, and our trains are unreliable as fuck. I'd be more inclined to think that their highly developed feelings of pride and shame are bigger drivers.
      - tjpnz 11mo ago
        Spoken to a few ojiisans here over the years and they'll always mention the value placed in making sure everything's well maintained. If you go out past midnight in Tokyo you'll frequently see gangs of workers on the lines doing inspections and installing new equipment. Can't comment on other countries but if you're not doing enough upkeep things will turn to shit fast.
  - M95D 11mo ago
    > There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service. They have other problems... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
- komali2 11mo ago
  I disagree and am working on an article arguing that Japan rail privatization represents a failure, as does its much lauded pedestrian friendliness. The premise is basically that Tokyo is the busiest city on planet earth and so should therefore have the best public transit and pedestrian infrastructure by a huge margin, when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars (Shibuya crossing should have been permanently closed to cars 20 years ago). As for trains, during rush hour trains can be so full you might be squashed against the door unable to move - incredibly unsafe, leads to daily injuries, and some argue have something to do with the heinous levels of sexual assault on trains. Not to mention even in Shinjuku station most platforms don't have guardrails to prevent accidental or purposeful death by trains, another outsized problem in Tokyo. But the most glaring issue is around the very design of the system. Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train. A government managed system wouldn't have this issue, it would simply combine the stations at design time.
  - hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
    I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted when those are legitimate problems. I disagree that this is a failure of privatization (other than the last point) and I also disagree that Japan’s success is a vindication of privatization (although it does show that above average systems are possible through privatization) but those are reasonable discussions to have
    - komali2 11mo ago
      I believe the public transit systems in most countries are so bad and underfunded that Japan's seems holy in comparison. And don't get me wrong, it's one of the best. For transit nerds like me though, it's frustrating when all the evidence points to the same conclusion: more trains, more pedestrian throughput, no cars, and yet no city has gone this route full throated. I was genuinely shocked on at the amount of space given to cars on my first trip to Copenhagen last month. I was promised bicyclist utopia, instead I was presented with massive lanes for cars, confusing intersections, and in a construction area being forced onto a narrow sidewalk full of pedestrians. Frankly I don't know any city on earth getting it right. I've heard maybe Shanghai but from videos I've seen of car culture in the PRC, I doubt it. The bar is just very low in this world right now.
- _jab 11mo ago
  In the US, one of the highest farebox recovery ratio transit systems has historically been BART, which is 2019 was 72%, and even today is around 50%. Unfortunately, having a very high ratio also makes systems much more vulnerable to collapse during periods of economic downturn, which is exactly what BART has been dealing with since ridership collapsed during Covid. I'm no expert in this topic (in other words, I just asked Claude this), but AFAICT part of the reason Japanese rail systems did better appears to be that they are owned by diversified companies that own numerous other assets, like hotels, restaurants, and office complexes.
  - rPlayer6554 11mo ago
    Every major station I went to in Japan had a huge mall with restaurants connected to it owned by the rail company. Inside stations were rail company owned gift shops, convince stores, etc.
    - jrockway 11mo ago
      I think that connecting outlying areas (especially ones you the railroad build yourself) to department stores is what got Japanese rail companies going, but it's probably less important now than it was initially. Farebox revenue covers profitable operation of the railroad. It even appears to cover upgrades; browse around on the satellite view of Tokyo and you can see many private companies moving their above-ground infrastructure to (expensive!) subways because ... trains hitting cars interferes with their ability to earn money. It is honestly something that I have trouble wrapping my head around. The business is so good you can afford to make it better, but the business is a commuter train? Weird! I think Japan is successful because of a less pervasive car culture than the US. People expect to walk 30 minutes to the train in the morning, that's just something you do. It would be unheard of in the US (and also dangerous in many suburbs, because they are designed to move as many giant SUVs as possible per hour, not to let pedestrians and cyclists get to the train station). Also, a big caveat is ... all of this is Tokyo and Osaka, very large, rich, and dense cities. When you go out into the middle of nowhere in Japan (even an hour out of Tokyo, think the Hachikō line, etc.), rail service kind of sucks and is subsidized heavily.
joshuaissac 11mo ago
It's hard to measure this. British Telecom lost its monopoly around the same time it was privatised. Is today's (very competitive) telecommunications market more a result of privatisation or of the loss of BT's monopoly? Another way to look at it would be, are BT's customers better off now, than when it was a government company?
- arethuza 11mo ago
  I would say BT got worse immediately after privatisation and now have got better - largely I suspect due to competition.
  - exasperaited 11mo ago
    Post-privatisation, Bonfield-era BT really was an abusive monopoly. I do not think the problems have gone away; dealing with OpenReach is very often as kafkaesque as it would have been.
    - arethuza 11mo ago
      Oh yeah - OpenReach is a bit of nightmare, but less of a nightmare than some energy suppliers I can mention...
- nyreed 11mo ago
  BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories equipment and expertise were instead exported to South Korea, enabling their widespread fiber penetrance. That delayed fiber rollout in the UK by decades. Was that a success? Could be they were too early to justify the cost? But without someone pushing ahead, who develops the technology?
  - panick21_ 11mo ago
    Do you have some source on this, sounds interesting. It could of course also have just been a failure if tried to early. So we should just assume this would have worked out perfectly.
fulafel 11mo ago
Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex". If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit. This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.
- graemep 11mo ago
  That has happened in Britain. it was how Gordon Brown claimed a balanced budget while running up what would be classified as off balance sheet debt if anyone other than the government did it. A lot of things like hospitals were financed this way. I would say the motive here was mostly to avoid increasing the government debt numbers. it would not work if the government did not exempt itself form the rules applied to everyone else.
- panick21_ 11mo ago
  This isn't really true, running things in the government also cost a huge amount of opex. Sure you do get one time payment and the resulting company will have to be hired but it will usually also have to start to compete. This could potentially result in more or less opex. Running an airline just so you don't have opex seems a bit silly to me for example.
  - fulafel 11mo ago
    Well, the brits eventually decided against it after a thorough investigation found it to be a waste of money - "a January 2018 report by the National Audit Office found that the UK had incurred many billions of pounds in extra costs for no clear benefit through PFIs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative#Ending_of_PFI_for_new_infrastructure_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative#End... Another antifeature is the lack of transparency. The costs and operations of the private company aren't public, which means the public doesn't know if the quality problems are due to skimping on costs or mismanagement etc and don't get the feedback necessary for decisionmaking for subsequent contracts. Regarding your airline analogy: my criticism wasn't about the private sector, my criticism was about copying it (poorly) in the public sector. There's things to criticise in the private sector side accounting incentives as well but it's a different kettle of fish.
InTheArena 11mo ago
Depends, do you travel through any of the airports in Europe, use many of the train services in Europe, get power from spain, portugal or (non-nuclear) France? Fly on a Airbus, or a Boeing with RR engines? There are legit reasons to be skeptical of privatization, but yes. It works well when it works. Dogmatic responses (free market == everything, only government and unions can provide service) are not helpful.
- paganel 11mo ago
  Airbus is by all intents and purposes a (multi-)State controlled company with privatized profits. You don’t get to have hefty defense contracts in countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if you’re de facto a private company, which they aren’t.
  - constantcrying 11mo ago
    >You don’t get to have hefty defense contracts in countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if you’re de facto a private company, which they aren’t. This is false. Saudi Arabi buys equipment from private companies. Most US Defense contractors are private companies, of course countries all around the world buy from private companies. The defense contracts of Airbus have nothing to do with them being partially state owned.
spacebanana7 11mo ago
In the UK the airline and telecom privatisations were largely successful (BA, Rolls Royce, BT, etc). BP did okay too. For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground. MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making Chinese state owned enterprise (SAIC). Still makes popular, cheap and not very reliable cars though.
- microtonal 11mo ago
  For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground. I know that there are some nuances to this, but this makes sense right? If you think you can compete on say London-Amsterdam, your airline can in principle decide to compete there (yes, they need slots, etc.). If you want to compete with rail between Amsterdam and Berlin, you are either going to pay an insane amount for extra infrastructure (too expensive) or you have to let companies bid on exploiting a line. But you can never have two companies competing at exactly the same times.
  - spacebanana7 11mo ago
    Yeah there’s probably a way in which railways and water are natural monopolies, so are more difficult to privatise.
    - fhennig 11mo ago
      Yes, it's the tracks. Planes don't need tracks.
      - gcanyon 11mo ago
        > Planes don't need tracks. But let's all take a moment to acknowledge that it would be awesome if they had them. Can you imagine the shenanigans you could get up to designing a nationwide 40,000-foot-high rollercoaster system?
immibis 11mo ago
Surely it depends on how you measure success. I'm sure a lot of politicians got very rich, so that's a success from their point of view.
gwbas1c 11mo ago
But but but... Someone got rich! Thus it has to work. (And if privatization doesn't work, we'll just repeat that it works over and over until people believe that it works.)
edent 11mo ago
It depends on what you count as a success. The privatisation of BT meant that there was no specific monopoly on ISPs during the Internet boom. While the privatised BT had a monopoly on the wires - customers could choose from hundreds of different dial-up and, later, ADSL ISPs. Similarly, the privatisation of the mobile phone networks means that the UK had some of the cheapest airtime contracts in the EU. Yes, there are still gaps in network coverage, but there were at the peak 5 different MNOs for customers to choose from each competing and driving down prices / increasing coverage. Energy has been mixed. Companies like Octopus have provided things like real-time electricity APIs. I can't imagine an organisation like British Gas launching something like that. Similarly, if your power supplier has crap customer service, you can move. And people do! In that sense, it has been a success. Pickfords was also privatised. People forget that house-moving companies were nationalised during WW2. The liberalisation of that market has been a success. You can argue about things like Rolls Royce, BP, British Airways etc. But I don't think they offset the utter failures of privatising water, trains, etc.
jhonof 11mo ago
CDPQ has been good at making transit in Canada, but they are working on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan so it's kind of a weird situation. I largely agree with you.
wtcactus 11mo ago
Depends. According to BBC & Friends, or according to reality?
deleted 11mo ago
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sschueller 11mo ago
You can't privatize what can't make money in itself. By that I mean, rail is beneficial to the entire economy of a country. This profit is not something a rail company can benefit from but a country can. Serving low traffic areas are a loss business but vital for a country to grow. Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town to build the next unicorn from his home benefits the entire nation. Not all talent is in the cities.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail. I think the difference is that the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state and leased out competitively to private train operators. It’s kind of like the airline model.
  - magicalhippo 11mo ago
    They've been doing that here in Norway as well for regular trains. The result is that the train operators get f'ed in the a by poor track maintenance and old trains. It has been so bad that when the trains run people joke it's "train for bus". Also us customers can no longer buy one ticket that gets us from A to B but often have to contend with 2-3 different operators.
  - tsukikage 11mo ago
    > the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state ...so, a bit like Network Rail, then?
  - naasking 11mo ago
    > Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail. I think whether privatization helps or hurts depends a lot on how corrupt or inept the government is, ie. the more corrupt or inept, the more privatization can probably help.
  - bryananderson 11mo ago
    Italy has not exactly privatized high speed rail. The public rail operator Trenitalia is by far the largest high speed rail operator in the country. And it’s great. What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo. Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).
Hilift 11mo ago
No. The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US, and families with three or more children poverty rate of 47%. The cost of benefits and other costly boondoggles compete with these failed public works ventures. The largest water utility has £20 billion debt and will probably need to be un-privatized. They probably breathe a sigh of relief knowing that France is twice as bad financially, so that feeds the denial mass delusion. And the economy doesn't have the fantasy growth that was expected, so automatic additional borrowing. And it's budget season. Yay!
- exasperaited 11mo ago
  > The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US, I'm sorry but any US figure you use to support this allegation is probably nonsense. US figures about joblessness and poverty are a joke, and typically in international comparisons they still use things like "access to air conditioning" as an indicator of poverty even though they are meaningless.
  - robtherobber 11mo ago
    I was going to say just that. The whole statement is ridiculous.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  Yay Brexit!
dickiedyce 11mo ago
LOL. Yes, Scottish Water was never privatised, and that's been a great story of success... even if it's only because it's not any of the failed English water companies.
- giraffe_lady 11mo ago
  Yeah I was going to say. Every one of these privatizations was a success from the point of view of the people who made them happen. They weakened worker power and increased the amount of money available to be extracted by the wealthy. If they happened to also make these important systems worse, well, that's our problem.
exasperaited 11mo ago
No. Because privatising natural monopolies always creates unwelcome outcomes for everyone except the new shareholders.
tialaramex 11mo ago
I'm the wrong person to try to steelman this, but lets have a go anyway with a couple I know well: 1. Internet Service Provision Britain chose to separate the intrinsically geographic monopoly of Last Mile Copper Loops from its existing non-intrinsic monopoly telephony provision. British Telecom, which had once been publicly owned, was obliged to distinguish "BT Openreach", the part of their company which inherits the local loop monopoly and which also offers (non-monopoly) long distance network transit and other useful stuff - from the consumer facing BT, which is a fairly ordinary PLC. I know a BT employee, the regulators really care that they can't collude with Openreach. This means that the tiny company providing my Internet access (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't need to own a large brick building down the street, or even a cabinet in that building, or negotiate a deal with a monopoly behemoth who can set their own terms unfairly. Instead, they pay Openreach to move packets from my home to a nearby city, and then they can choose to pay Openreach or its competitors to move those packets from the city to their routers. BT Openeach is a monopoly, but it's an ordinary public company just with a lot of regulations to ensure it behaves equally for A&A as it does for its owners BT. BT isn't a monopoly but it does have lots of customers, I think its services are crap or alternatively that they're too expensive (A&A is more expensive but much, much better, if BT were much cheaper than they are maybe that's a good deal for somebody) This arrangement means most UK residents have dozens of potential reasonable ISP options, with a range of pricing and terms, including lots of "All you can eat" type packages, even if they don't live in a big city. People like me who do live in a big city get slightly more options (a Cable TV company, a local fibre startup), which can go cheaper and higher bandwidth, but only a few people are stuck with a single practical option as is common in the US - basically only people in very rural areas, and usually their option is community owned, so it may not be cheap but it's at least owned by actual people who might care. 2. Energy Britain separately privatised the gas and electricity supply. Now on the surface this is lunacy because of course that's a geographic monopoly. But they're not complete idiots, so what was actually privatised was mostly the customer service/ end user billing part of the problem. My gas and electricity come from the same place as my neighbour, inevitably because they're the same pipes and wires, but my bills and my customer service are from my choice which happens to be Octopus. Does this achieve anything useful? Eh, maybe. I don't think a local energy monopoly would be anywhere close to as good at either customer service or billing. Octopus seem to have some idea what they're actually doing. On the downside these firms have ended up costing tax payers a bunch of money because of course when one goes bust the gas and electricity are still working but the government is on the hook to ensure somebody else handles billing them for it and that's complicated. This happens far too often when there is stress on the financials of these firms e.g. the Ukraine situation fluctuated energy bills with little notice. Edited: fix s/citizen/resident/ what matters isn't your passport but where you live
threemux 11mo ago
In the US, some have failed, some have worked. In my home state of Maryland, the PPP (P3) for redeveloping the Travel Plazas along I-95 is often cited as a success story and they are indeed widely considered top notch rest stops. It's a small-ish thing, but it did work. https://mdta.maryland.gov/Partnerships/tp3Overview.html https://mdta.maryland.gov/Partnerships/tp3Overview.html I don't know enough to say if Seagirt is considered a success but I do know Baltimore's port does very well. The Purple Line is/was a failure.
panick21_ 11mo ago
There have been lots of privatizations all over the Western world and most are not well known, its the negative examples that are very much talked about. And many or most are somewhere between fully private and fully public anyway, so the picture is much more muddy. I think to say its all a failure would be very reductive. I think many of the telephone operator privatization worked pretty well in most places and buildup of user business for those companies and more competition, mostly from formerly public operators competing in other markets. But it also depends on the country. Some of the airline privatization seems to me also sensible. In my country (Switzerland) government owned some banks or partly old them and sold some stock in them, witch seems sensible to me. Some water infrastructure was privatized and regulated in many countries and for the most part this has worked fine, maybe not in Britain. Denmark seems to have done quite a lot of privatization and it was mostly considered pretty well done. I was really surprised how much of this was done all over Europe, often by 'left' governments. Once you start researching you find more and more. Would be the work for an economists thesis or something to try to do a full accounting of this across all European nations.
faidit 11mo ago
The New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia (1921) and Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up in China (1980s) both saw privatizations and significant economic improvement. But those were corrections of rare cases of having way too much (ie, near-absolute) state control, where even stuff like private barbers had been illegal. That said, in the case of Russia of course, wider privatization in the 1990s was disastrous in many ways
- Ray20 11mo ago
  > in the case of Russia of course, wider privatization in the 1990s was disastrous in many ways When you effectively hand over state property to high-ranking communists for less than five percent of its real value, that is not a privatization.
simgt 11mo ago
> Does any country have any success stories? Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).
- cmrdporcupine 11mo ago
  That's the same model we have in Canada here mainly. Provinces pay for the service, but family doctors and most other practitioners are private businesses that then bill the government based on a set fee schedule. The exception I guess is hospitals which are kind of a mixed structure of some kind and doctors in them are salaried employees not businesses of their own. The problem with this approach is it intrinsically creates conflict between the doctors and the gov't about how fees are structured, and the patient gets stuck in the middle. That and inconsistent standards, structure, and quality. Couple that with conservative governments that sometimes have ideological antipathy to socialized medicine generally, and there's a recipe for difficulties. I'm given to understand that the NHS in the UK is not like this, and most doctors are salaried? I could be getting some details wrong.
  - p_l 11mo ago
    NHS services originally (tories have been chipping at it a lot) had all NHS services delivered by NHS staff and infrastructure, with I think one major exception being dentistry. In Poland we have public insurance system (also slowly killed by government) but in reality nearly all providers are private or, at most, owned by local government (city etc.)
blibble 11mo ago
telecoms, wired broadband is competitive and has variety of different levels of service at different price points water/electricity/gas have been abject failures railways have been a mixed bag some things are better (quality of service is much better), some things are worse (subsidy and cost) but a good chunk of that is under direct government control, and has been for a very long time the only private bit is/was the TOC, "train operating company" (and roscos... which are another subject) TOCs essentially just put a driver in the cab, and collect the fares and send them to the government they don't maintain the track, they don't set the fares, they don't set driver pay, they don't control the service pattern if your train service sucked during the last few years: it's probably the government's fault
indoordin0saur 11mo ago
Hong Kong is considered to have the best subway system in the world and it is private and for-profit. Though the largest shareholder of its stock is the Hong Kong government.
- p_l 11mo ago
  In many countries that is considered a state-owned business
deleted 11mo ago
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guywithahat 11mo ago
One could argue the rails were a success. The article argues deaths went up after privatization, but that's only because the miles being ridden went up significantly as well. Actual deaths per mile are down. Further the drop in ridership in 2021 was due to covid, and the financial strain was caused largely by the rail industry re-investing heavily before covid.
hylaride 11mo ago
> Does any country have any success stories? Yes, but it depends on how/why things are done. You don't hear about the successes because it's not a story worth telling. Charter schools are a good example. They have mixed success when deployed. In many places they're deployed by right-wing politicians primarily to weaken public schools (and their unions). This can be done via a variety of ways, such as letting the charter schools charge extra (thereby essentially subsidizing private schools), allowing the schools to "expel" problem children, thereby dumping the public system with them, etc. The result is usually a framework that isn't designed to actually make education better. In some places (Sweden is a good example), charter schools were implemented by a centre-left government because all attempts at school reform failed due to a variety of reasons. The result was by most measures successful as the charter schools couldn't pick and choose kids, were still held accountable, and it resulted in the public schools having to stop fighting reform in order to sort of compete. The Canada line in Vancouver (metro link to the airport) was build on time and on budget and is still run by a P3 company, as is the new REM line in Montreal. The incentives here were ONE company was given a contract with clearly laid out incentives and minimal political meddling after that (as opposed to other P3s where the government is highly involved and subcontracts, etc get doled out to connected firms, etc). The UK car industry was mostly privatized, but judgement on its post-privatization failure mostly goes down political lines (eg should a government continue to subsidize poorly made cars in the name of employment). Same with most of the rest of industrial Britain, which under public ownership was uncompetitive in most cases. That being said, most would consider Rolls-Royce to be successful and was privatized in the 1980s. BP's privitization was mostly a success, even with all its issues. Canada privatized CN rail and it is now one of the most efficient freight railroads in North America. Telecom privatization in the EU has mostly been a success (though one could argue that the EU has pushed for too much competition, which has meant that while mobile prices are generally very low, it has made it harder for companies to invest). Many airlines outside of the USA were also publicly owned pseudo-monopolies. Flying is cheaper than it's ever been, even if no longer glamourous. The TL;DR is of course it's a mixed bag and depends on so many factors. Many UK industrial firms were so poorly run under private ownership that they were so far behind they couldn't catch up and compete once privatization did happen.
n1b0m 11mo ago
The privatisation of the water industry in the UK certainly wasn’t and is considered a failure due to rising bills, poor infrastructure, and severe pollution from sewage overflows.
sandbags 11mo ago
I'd argue that privatising telecomms has been a win. I think because it's quite open to competition (even if there has been a good deal of consolidation). The challenge with so many UK privatisations is that the idea of real alternatives/competition ranges from laughable to extremely laughable.
purple_turtle 11mo ago
Some communist era enterprises failed (or would have failed) on open market and entirely deserved this. Extreme absurdities included hunting whales to fulfil production quota, then dumping carcasses into sea as they were not needed for anything. Some species were hunted into extinction this way, for no benefit whatsoever.
ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
Very fair question. Let's also consider the inverse. Are there any modern government run success stories in Britain?
andy_ppp 11mo ago
All things where you can't have genuine competition are a disaster. I'm not against taking these things away from government but it might be better to have a non-profit that isn't as directly controlled by the whims of politicians. Independent similarly like the Bank of England with very clear metrics/goals on how to run the company.
constantcrying 11mo ago
>Does any country have any success stories? Both Airbus and Volkswagen were set up by Governments. T-Mobile is arguably quite successful.
retube 11mo ago
British Airways?
DrBazza 11mo ago
British Telecom. Party lines and waiting a couple of months to be connected were part of the fun times in the 70s. Imagine having one mobile phone provider.

Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.

rPlayer6554 11mo ago

Japan’s rail privatization was extremely successful and it’s considered one of the best rail networks in the world now.

ApolloFortyNine 11mo ago

Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1] And they actually continue to expand their service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

dboreham 11mo ago
Japan has a culture of running trains on time though. There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service.
- tjpnz 11mo ago
  And even if there was they couldn't thanks to unions and some of the strongest worker protections in the developed world. That doesn't even touch on the loss of face for proposing such a thing.
  - simgt 11mo ago
    Is it really their recipe for greatness? We have very strong unions and worker protections in France, and our trains are unreliable as fuck. I'd be more inclined to think that their highly developed feelings of pride and shame are bigger drivers.
    - tjpnz 11mo ago
      Spoken to a few ojiisans here over the years and they'll always mention the value placed in making sure everything's well maintained. If you go out past midnight in Tokyo you'll frequently see gangs of workers on the lines doing inspections and installing new equipment. Can't comment on other countries but if you're not doing enough upkeep things will turn to shit fast.
- M95D 11mo ago
  > There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service. They have other problems... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
komali2 11mo ago
I disagree and am working on an article arguing that Japan rail privatization represents a failure, as does its much lauded pedestrian friendliness. The premise is basically that Tokyo is the busiest city on planet earth and so should therefore have the best public transit and pedestrian infrastructure by a huge margin, when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars (Shibuya crossing should have been permanently closed to cars 20 years ago). As for trains, during rush hour trains can be so full you might be squashed against the door unable to move - incredibly unsafe, leads to daily injuries, and some argue have something to do with the heinous levels of sexual assault on trains. Not to mention even in Shinjuku station most platforms don't have guardrails to prevent accidental or purposeful death by trains, another outsized problem in Tokyo. But the most glaring issue is around the very design of the system. Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train. A government managed system wouldn't have this issue, it would simply combine the stations at design time.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted when those are legitimate problems. I disagree that this is a failure of privatization (other than the last point) and I also disagree that Japan’s success is a vindication of privatization (although it does show that above average systems are possible through privatization) but those are reasonable discussions to have
  - komali2 11mo ago
    I believe the public transit systems in most countries are so bad and underfunded that Japan's seems holy in comparison. And don't get me wrong, it's one of the best. For transit nerds like me though, it's frustrating when all the evidence points to the same conclusion: more trains, more pedestrian throughput, no cars, and yet no city has gone this route full throated. I was genuinely shocked on at the amount of space given to cars on my first trip to Copenhagen last month. I was promised bicyclist utopia, instead I was presented with massive lanes for cars, confusing intersections, and in a construction area being forced onto a narrow sidewalk full of pedestrians. Frankly I don't know any city on earth getting it right. I've heard maybe Shanghai but from videos I've seen of car culture in the PRC, I doubt it. The bar is just very low in this world right now.
_jab 11mo ago
In the US, one of the highest farebox recovery ratio transit systems has historically been BART, which is 2019 was 72%, and even today is around 50%. Unfortunately, having a very high ratio also makes systems much more vulnerable to collapse during periods of economic downturn, which is exactly what BART has been dealing with since ridership collapsed during Covid. I'm no expert in this topic (in other words, I just asked Claude this), but AFAICT part of the reason Japanese rail systems did better appears to be that they are owned by diversified companies that own numerous other assets, like hotels, restaurants, and office complexes.
- rPlayer6554 11mo ago
  Every major station I went to in Japan had a huge mall with restaurants connected to it owned by the rail company. Inside stations were rail company owned gift shops, convince stores, etc.
  - jrockway 11mo ago
    I think that connecting outlying areas (especially ones you the railroad build yourself) to department stores is what got Japanese rail companies going, but it's probably less important now than it was initially. Farebox revenue covers profitable operation of the railroad. It even appears to cover upgrades; browse around on the satellite view of Tokyo and you can see many private companies moving their above-ground infrastructure to (expensive!) subways because ... trains hitting cars interferes with their ability to earn money. It is honestly something that I have trouble wrapping my head around. The business is so good you can afford to make it better, but the business is a commuter train? Weird! I think Japan is successful because of a less pervasive car culture than the US. People expect to walk 30 minutes to the train in the morning, that's just something you do. It would be unheard of in the US (and also dangerous in many suburbs, because they are designed to move as many giant SUVs as possible per hour, not to let pedestrians and cyclists get to the train station). Also, a big caveat is ... all of this is Tokyo and Osaka, very large, rich, and dense cities. When you go out into the middle of nowhere in Japan (even an hour out of Tokyo, think the Hachikō line, etc.), rail service kind of sucks and is subsidized heavily.

joshuaissac 11mo ago

It's hard to measure this. British Telecom lost its monopoly around the same time it was privatised. Is today's (very competitive) telecommunications market more a result of privatisation or of the loss of BT's monopoly? Another way to look at it would be, are BT's customers better off now, than when it was a government company?

arethuza 11mo ago
I would say BT got worse immediately after privatisation and now have got better - largely I suspect due to competition.
- exasperaited 11mo ago
  Post-privatisation, Bonfield-era BT really was an abusive monopoly. I do not think the problems have gone away; dealing with OpenReach is very often as kafkaesque as it would have been.
  - arethuza 11mo ago
    Oh yeah - OpenReach is a bit of nightmare, but less of a nightmare than some energy suppliers I can mention...
nyreed 11mo ago
BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories equipment and expertise were instead exported to South Korea, enabling their widespread fiber penetrance. That delayed fiber rollout in the UK by decades. Was that a success? Could be they were too early to justify the cost? But without someone pushing ahead, who develops the technology?
- panick21_ 11mo ago
  Do you have some source on this, sounds interesting. It could of course also have just been a failure if tried to early. So we should just assume this would have worked out perfectly.

fulafel 11mo ago

Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex". If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit. This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.

graemep 11mo ago
That has happened in Britain. it was how Gordon Brown claimed a balanced budget while running up what would be classified as off balance sheet debt if anyone other than the government did it. A lot of things like hospitals were financed this way. I would say the motive here was mostly to avoid increasing the government debt numbers. it would not work if the government did not exempt itself form the rules applied to everyone else.
panick21_ 11mo ago
This isn't really true, running things in the government also cost a huge amount of opex. Sure you do get one time payment and the resulting company will have to be hired but it will usually also have to start to compete. This could potentially result in more or less opex. Running an airline just so you don't have opex seems a bit silly to me for example.
- fulafel 11mo ago
  Well, the brits eventually decided against it after a thorough investigation found it to be a waste of money - "a January 2018 report by the National Audit Office found that the UK had incurred many billions of pounds in extra costs for no clear benefit through PFIs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative#Ending_of_PFI_for_new_infrastructure_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative#End... Another antifeature is the lack of transparency. The costs and operations of the private company aren't public, which means the public doesn't know if the quality problems are due to skimping on costs or mismanagement etc and don't get the feedback necessary for decisionmaking for subsequent contracts. Regarding your airline analogy: my criticism wasn't about the private sector, my criticism was about copying it (poorly) in the public sector. There's things to criticise in the private sector side accounting incentives as well but it's a different kettle of fish.

InTheArena 11mo ago

Depends, do you travel through any of the airports in Europe, use many of the train services in Europe, get power from spain, portugal or (non-nuclear) France? Fly on a Airbus, or a Boeing with RR engines? There are legit reasons to be skeptical of privatization, but yes. It works well when it works. Dogmatic responses (free market == everything, only government and unions can provide service) are not helpful.

paganel 11mo ago
Airbus is by all intents and purposes a (multi-)State controlled company with privatized profits. You don’t get to have hefty defense contracts in countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if you’re de facto a private company, which they aren’t.
- constantcrying 11mo ago
  >You don’t get to have hefty defense contracts in countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if you’re de facto a private company, which they aren’t. This is false. Saudi Arabi buys equipment from private companies. Most US Defense contractors are private companies, of course countries all around the world buy from private companies. The defense contracts of Airbus have nothing to do with them being partially state owned.

spacebanana7 11mo ago

In the UK the airline and telecom privatisations were largely successful (BA, Rolls Royce, BT, etc). BP did okay too. For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground. MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making Chinese state owned enterprise (SAIC). Still makes popular, cheap and not very reliable cars though.

microtonal 11mo ago
For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground. I know that there are some nuances to this, but this makes sense right? If you think you can compete on say London-Amsterdam, your airline can in principle decide to compete there (yes, they need slots, etc.). If you want to compete with rail between Amsterdam and Berlin, you are either going to pay an insane amount for extra infrastructure (too expensive) or you have to let companies bid on exploiting a line. But you can never have two companies competing at exactly the same times.
- spacebanana7 11mo ago
  Yeah there’s probably a way in which railways and water are natural monopolies, so are more difficult to privatise.
  - fhennig 11mo ago
    Yes, it's the tracks. Planes don't need tracks.
    - gcanyon 11mo ago
      > Planes don't need tracks. But let's all take a moment to acknowledge that it would be awesome if they had them. Can you imagine the shenanigans you could get up to designing a nationwide 40,000-foot-high rollercoaster system?

immibis 11mo ago

Surely it depends on how you measure success. I'm sure a lot of politicians got very rich, so that's a success from their point of view.

gwbas1c 11mo ago

But but but... Someone got rich! Thus it has to work. (And if privatization doesn't work, we'll just repeat that it works over and over until people believe that it works.)

edent 11mo ago

It depends on what you count as a success. The privatisation of BT meant that there was no specific monopoly on ISPs during the Internet boom. While the privatised BT had a monopoly on the wires - customers could choose from hundreds of different dial-up and, later, ADSL ISPs. Similarly, the privatisation of the mobile phone networks means that the UK had some of the cheapest airtime contracts in the EU. Yes, there are still gaps in network coverage, but there were at the peak 5 different MNOs for customers to choose from each competing and driving down prices / increasing coverage. Energy has been mixed. Companies like Octopus have provided things like real-time electricity APIs. I can't imagine an organisation like British Gas launching something like that. Similarly, if your power supplier has crap customer service, you can move. And people do! In that sense, it has been a success. Pickfords was also privatised. People forget that house-moving companies were nationalised during WW2. The liberalisation of that market has been a success. You can argue about things like Rolls Royce, BP, British Airways etc. But I don't think they offset the utter failures of privatising water, trains, etc.

jhonof 11mo ago

CDPQ has been good at making transit in Canada, but they are working on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan so it's kind of a weird situation. I largely agree with you.

wtcactus 11mo ago

Depends. According to BBC & Friends, or according to reality?

deleted 11mo ago

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sschueller 11mo ago

You can't privatize what can't make money in itself. By that I mean, rail is beneficial to the entire economy of a country. This profit is not something a rail company can benefit from but a country can. Serving low traffic areas are a loss business but vital for a country to grow. Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town to build the next unicorn from his home benefits the entire nation. Not all talent is in the cities.

hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail. I think the difference is that the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state and leased out competitively to private train operators. It’s kind of like the airline model.
- magicalhippo 11mo ago
  They've been doing that here in Norway as well for regular trains. The result is that the train operators get f'ed in the a by poor track maintenance and old trains. It has been so bad that when the trains run people joke it's "train for bus". Also us customers can no longer buy one ticket that gets us from A to B but often have to contend with 2-3 different operators.
- tsukikage 11mo ago
  > the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state ...so, a bit like Network Rail, then?
- naasking 11mo ago
  > Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail. I think whether privatization helps or hurts depends a lot on how corrupt or inept the government is, ie. the more corrupt or inept, the more privatization can probably help.
- bryananderson 11mo ago
  Italy has not exactly privatized high speed rail. The public rail operator Trenitalia is by far the largest high speed rail operator in the country. And it’s great. What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo. Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).

Hilift 11mo ago

No. The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US, and families with three or more children poverty rate of 47%. The cost of benefits and other costly boondoggles compete with these failed public works ventures. The largest water utility has £20 billion debt and will probably need to be un-privatized. They probably breathe a sigh of relief knowing that France is twice as bad financially, so that feeds the denial mass delusion. And the economy doesn't have the fantasy growth that was expected, so automatic additional borrowing. And it's budget season. Yay!

exasperaited 11mo ago
> The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US, I'm sorry but any US figure you use to support this allegation is probably nonsense. US figures about joblessness and poverty are a joke, and typically in international comparisons they still use things like "access to air conditioning" as an indicator of poverty even though they are meaningless.
- robtherobber 11mo ago
  I was going to say just that. The whole statement is ridiculous.
hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
Yay Brexit!

dickiedyce 11mo ago

LOL. Yes, Scottish Water was never privatised, and that's been a great story of success... even if it's only because it's not any of the failed English water companies.

giraffe_lady 11mo ago
Yeah I was going to say. Every one of these privatizations was a success from the point of view of the people who made them happen. They weakened worker power and increased the amount of money available to be extracted by the wealthy. If they happened to also make these important systems worse, well, that's our problem.

exasperaited 11mo ago

No. Because privatising natural monopolies always creates unwelcome outcomes for everyone except the new shareholders.

tialaramex 11mo ago

I'm the wrong person to try to steelman this, but lets have a go anyway with a couple I know well: 1. Internet Service Provision Britain chose to separate the intrinsically geographic monopoly of Last Mile Copper Loops from its existing non-intrinsic monopoly telephony provision. British Telecom, which had once been publicly owned, was obliged to distinguish "BT Openreach", the part of their company which inherits the local loop monopoly and which also offers (non-monopoly) long distance network transit and other useful stuff - from the consumer facing BT, which is a fairly ordinary PLC. I know a BT employee, the regulators really care that they can't collude with Openreach. This means that the tiny company providing my Internet access (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't need to own a large brick building down the street, or even a cabinet in that building, or negotiate a deal with a monopoly behemoth who can set their own terms unfairly. Instead, they pay Openreach to move packets from my home to a nearby city, and then they can choose to pay Openreach or its competitors to move those packets from the city to their routers. BT Openeach is a monopoly, but it's an ordinary public company just with a lot of regulations to ensure it behaves equally for A&A as it does for its owners BT. BT isn't a monopoly but it does have lots of customers, I think its services are crap or alternatively that they're too expensive (A&A is more expensive but much, much better, if BT were much cheaper than they are maybe that's a good deal for somebody) This arrangement means most UK residents have dozens of potential reasonable ISP options, with a range of pricing and terms, including lots of "All you can eat" type packages, even if they don't live in a big city. People like me who do live in a big city get slightly more options (a Cable TV company, a local fibre startup), which can go cheaper and higher bandwidth, but only a few people are stuck with a single practical option as is common in the US - basically only people in very rural areas, and usually their option is community owned, so it may not be cheap but it's at least owned by actual people who might care. 2. Energy Britain separately privatised the gas and electricity supply. Now on the surface this is lunacy because of course that's a geographic monopoly. But they're not complete idiots, so what was actually privatised was mostly the customer service/ end user billing part of the problem. My gas and electricity come from the same place as my neighbour, inevitably because they're the same pipes and wires, but my bills and my customer service are from my choice which happens to be Octopus. Does this achieve anything useful? Eh, maybe. I don't think a local energy monopoly would be anywhere close to as good at either customer service or billing. Octopus seem to have some idea what they're actually doing. On the downside these firms have ended up costing tax payers a bunch of money because of course when one goes bust the gas and electricity are still working but the government is on the hook to ensure somebody else handles billing them for it and that's complicated. This happens far too often when there is stress on the financials of these firms e.g. the Ukraine situation fluctuated energy bills with little notice. Edited: fix s/citizen/resident/ what matters isn't your passport but where you live

threemux 11mo ago

In the US, some have failed, some have worked. In my home state of Maryland, the PPP (P3) for redeveloping the Travel Plazas along I-95 is often cited as a success story and they are indeed widely considered top notch rest stops. It's a small-ish thing, but it did work. https://mdta.maryland.gov/Partnerships/tp3Overview.html https://mdta.maryland.gov/Partnerships/tp3Overview.html I don't know enough to say if Seagirt is considered a success but I do know Baltimore's port does very well. The Purple Line is/was a failure.

panick21_ 11mo ago

There have been lots of privatizations all over the Western world and most are not well known, its the negative examples that are very much talked about. And many or most are somewhere between fully private and fully public anyway, so the picture is much more muddy. I think to say its all a failure would be very reductive. I think many of the telephone operator privatization worked pretty well in most places and buildup of user business for those companies and more competition, mostly from formerly public operators competing in other markets. But it also depends on the country. Some of the airline privatization seems to me also sensible. In my country (Switzerland) government owned some banks or partly old them and sold some stock in them, witch seems sensible to me. Some water infrastructure was privatized and regulated in many countries and for the most part this has worked fine, maybe not in Britain. Denmark seems to have done quite a lot of privatization and it was mostly considered pretty well done. I was really surprised how much of this was done all over Europe, often by 'left' governments. Once you start researching you find more and more. Would be the work for an economists thesis or something to try to do a full accounting of this across all European nations.

faidit 11mo ago

The New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia (1921) and Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up in China (1980s) both saw privatizations and significant economic improvement. But those were corrections of rare cases of having way too much (ie, near-absolute) state control, where even stuff like private barbers had been illegal. That said, in the case of Russia of course, wider privatization in the 1990s was disastrous in many ways

Ray20 11mo ago
> in the case of Russia of course, wider privatization in the 1990s was disastrous in many ways When you effectively hand over state property to high-ranking communists for less than five percent of its real value, that is not a privatization.

simgt 11mo ago

> Does any country have any success stories? Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).

cmrdporcupine 11mo ago
That's the same model we have in Canada here mainly. Provinces pay for the service, but family doctors and most other practitioners are private businesses that then bill the government based on a set fee schedule. The exception I guess is hospitals which are kind of a mixed structure of some kind and doctors in them are salaried employees not businesses of their own. The problem with this approach is it intrinsically creates conflict between the doctors and the gov't about how fees are structured, and the patient gets stuck in the middle. That and inconsistent standards, structure, and quality. Couple that with conservative governments that sometimes have ideological antipathy to socialized medicine generally, and there's a recipe for difficulties. I'm given to understand that the NHS in the UK is not like this, and most doctors are salaried? I could be getting some details wrong.
- p_l 11mo ago
  NHS services originally (tories have been chipping at it a lot) had all NHS services delivered by NHS staff and infrastructure, with I think one major exception being dentistry. In Poland we have public insurance system (also slowly killed by government) but in reality nearly all providers are private or, at most, owned by local government (city etc.)

blibble 11mo ago

telecoms, wired broadband is competitive and has variety of different levels of service at different price points water/electricity/gas have been abject failures railways have been a mixed bag some things are better (quality of service is much better), some things are worse (subsidy and cost) but a good chunk of that is under direct government control, and has been for a very long time the only private bit is/was the TOC, "train operating company" (and roscos... which are another subject) TOCs essentially just put a driver in the cab, and collect the fares and send them to the government they don't maintain the track, they don't set the fares, they don't set driver pay, they don't control the service pattern if your train service sucked during the last few years: it's probably the government's fault

indoordin0saur 11mo ago

Hong Kong is considered to have the best subway system in the world and it is private and for-profit. Though the largest shareholder of its stock is the Hong Kong government.

p_l 11mo ago
In many countries that is considered a state-owned business

deleted 11mo ago

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guywithahat 11mo ago

One could argue the rails were a success. The article argues deaths went up after privatization, but that's only because the miles being ridden went up significantly as well. Actual deaths per mile are down. Further the drop in ridership in 2021 was due to covid, and the financial strain was caused largely by the rail industry re-investing heavily before covid.

hylaride 11mo ago

> Does any country have any success stories? Yes, but it depends on how/why things are done. You don't hear about the successes because it's not a story worth telling. Charter schools are a good example. They have mixed success when deployed. In many places they're deployed by right-wing politicians primarily to weaken public schools (and their unions). This can be done via a variety of ways, such as letting the charter schools charge extra (thereby essentially subsidizing private schools), allowing the schools to "expel" problem children, thereby dumping the public system with them, etc. The result is usually a framework that isn't designed to actually make education better. In some places (Sweden is a good example), charter schools were implemented by a centre-left government because all attempts at school reform failed due to a variety of reasons. The result was by most measures successful as the charter schools couldn't pick and choose kids, were still held accountable, and it resulted in the public schools having to stop fighting reform in order to sort of compete. The Canada line in Vancouver (metro link to the airport) was build on time and on budget and is still run by a P3 company, as is the new REM line in Montreal. The incentives here were ONE company was given a contract with clearly laid out incentives and minimal political meddling after that (as opposed to other P3s where the government is highly involved and subcontracts, etc get doled out to connected firms, etc). The UK car industry was mostly privatized, but judgement on its post-privatization failure mostly goes down political lines (eg should a government continue to subsidize poorly made cars in the name of employment). Same with most of the rest of industrial Britain, which under public ownership was uncompetitive in most cases. That being said, most would consider Rolls-Royce to be successful and was privatized in the 1980s. BP's privitization was mostly a success, even with all its issues. Canada privatized CN rail and it is now one of the most efficient freight railroads in North America. Telecom privatization in the EU has mostly been a success (though one could argue that the EU has pushed for too much competition, which has meant that while mobile prices are generally very low, it has made it harder for companies to invest). Many airlines outside of the USA were also publicly owned pseudo-monopolies. Flying is cheaper than it's ever been, even if no longer glamourous. The TL;DR is of course it's a mixed bag and depends on so many factors. Many UK industrial firms were so poorly run under private ownership that they were so far behind they couldn't catch up and compete once privatization did happen.

n1b0m 11mo ago

The privatisation of the water industry in the UK certainly wasn’t and is considered a failure due to rising bills, poor infrastructure, and severe pollution from sewage overflows.

sandbags 11mo ago

I'd argue that privatising telecomms has been a win. I think because it's quite open to competition (even if there has been a good deal of consolidation). The challenge with so many UK privatisations is that the idea of real alternatives/competition ranges from laughable to extremely laughable.

purple_turtle 11mo ago

Some communist era enterprises failed (or would have failed) on open market and entirely deserved this. Extreme absurdities included hunting whales to fulfil production quota, then dumping carcasses into sea as they were not needed for anything. Some species were hunted into extinction this way, for no benefit whatsoever.

ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago

Very fair question. Let's also consider the inverse. Are there any modern government run success stories in Britain?

andy_ppp 11mo ago

All things where you can't have genuine competition are a disaster. I'm not against taking these things away from government but it might be better to have a non-profit that isn't as directly controlled by the whims of politicians. Independent similarly like the Bank of England with very clear metrics/goals on how to run the company.

constantcrying 11mo ago

>Does any country have any success stories? Both Airbus and Volkswagen were set up by Governments. T-Mobile is arguably quite successful.

retube 11mo ago

British Airways?

DrBazza 11mo ago

British Telecom. Party lines and waiting a couple of months to be connected were part of the fun times in the 70s. Imagine having one mobile phone provider.