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.
Does any country have any success stories?
I can’t think of any.
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.
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.
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.
...so, a bit like Network Rail, then?
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.
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).
It's sarcasm, many drivers don't realize that the public subsidizes them too, but have such silly arguments.
For clarity's sake, I think railways should be public, and paid for with a combination of taxes and fares.
The model should be that rails are public and are leased to private operators.
The private companies pay for the maintenance and such, and then are free to do what they prefer.
* Government is unable (for various reasons, the primary one being massive levels of corruption) to invest in expanding capacity. Demand on certain routes is multiples of the capacity that exists. * The trains are owned by private companies, this was a bad idea. * Operating companies have had to put prices up because of all the things outside of their control. Government has been happy to let them take the blame, it has allowed things to be moved into public ownership, more power, more control. * No-one is making any money because the idea is for no-one to make any money. Making money is dirty so operating companies make no profit, and prices are sky-high.
Only if you discount the infrastructure subsidies, I think.
The real problem, as always is NIMBYism and the western aversion to luxury malls and mass consumerism, which ends of in a self-reinforcing cycle of increasingly miserable public sphere as nobody wants to engage with it or make it better.
And they actually continue to expand their service.
They have other problems...
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.
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
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.
That's not the fault of the railways but govenrment policy in the 60-80s. Everybody drunk the US coolaid.
I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but: is there a reason they can't run more trains or higher-passenger-capacity trains? The demand is obviously there, so the question is: do they like it super-crowded?
Length is limited by platform length and width is limited by tunnel loading gauge and platform sizes. To increase the platform length, you have to do it at most if not all stations. Crowded stations are usually in desirable areas which make it harder to dig or acquire land.
> run more trains
For lines at capacity, I believe it's usually limited by trains dwell time. Longer and bigger trains take longer for people to safely board. To improve this on the train side, you can have more doors and bigger doors. Station platforms also need to be bigger, have more stairs, bigger walkways, etc. Longer trains also make it tougher for train drivers and station staff to open and close the doors safely.
Tough but not impossible problems but many solutions contain trade offs. Only surefire way is to build another line but that costs tons of money.
There are several limits on the length of trains, but the primary one is platform length. It's no use running a 7 car train if all of your platforms are 6 cars long - anything you might gain in capacity per train is wiped out by increased dwell time. You can extend platforms, but it's expensive, disruptive and only works if you have sufficient space at all (or practically all) of the stations on the route.
Japan can't really justify major rail investment, because passenger demand has been steadily declining for decades. Peak-time trains get progressively less busy every year, simply because there are fewer commuters every year.
> 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.
I believe this is the result of different private companies operating physically separate lines, rather than some privatization activities? For example, Shinjuku has stations of JR East (result of JNR privatization), Keio (private), Odakyu (private), Toei (public), Tokyo Metro ("private" but owned by Japan gov and tokyo metro gov). Sure, JNR privatization is controversial but without that, Shinjuku is still a mess of different operators.
Are you suggesting the government turn back time and banned private companies owning rail or they should buy out and nationalize all rails companies?
> A government managed system wouldn't have this issue
Well, if it's 2 different government levels and 2 entities, the issue still exists. For example, to transfer between Tokyo Metro and Toei Subway, you might need to tap or a transfer ticket https://www.tokyometro.jp/lang_en/ticket/types/connection/in...
It's also possible for public and private companies to cooperate. Keikyu main line (private) does through running on Toei Asakusa line that allows the subway to have connections to both airports through private rails.
Nowadays, with IC cards, transferring between systems is a breeze. For the walking distance, nothing much you can do besides moving the track itself (done sometimes) or station redesign with better walkways and tunnels (done often).
Tokyo has the top 3 busiest train stations in the world. 8 of the top 15, 9 if you count Yokohama. To argue that they're somehow failing to provide a service, and that privatization is the problem, just sounds insane. [1]
It's 'don't let perfect be the enemy of good' taken to the very extreme. I'm really not sure how to have a productive conversation with this premise.
>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
Heavy emphasis on sometimes since they're often connected at a station if it's busy enough (yes you have to 'exit' a gate then enter another. There's plenty examples of lines in city subways not having tunnels between them as well, and having to walk outside.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Air travel lends itself better to competition and it needs much, much less infrastructure than rail.
Of course BOAC and BEA had been made my consolidations of many smaller airlines which gets messy quickly when tracing the lineage. Even Cambrian and Northeast had formed British Air Services prior to this which was 70% owned by BEA.
So it is technically true that is was started as a state owned airline, but one made from companies that were originally created as private with a mixed history of state ownership.
The semi-successful ones are the "shell company" ones: telecoms, power, and railways. The user gets a choice of who to get customer service on, which feels nicer than a government bureaucracy, but the infrastructure is a natural monopoly so the actual hardware delivering the service is mostly the same.
Electricity markets work pretty well as a market and has miraculously managed a lot of carbon transition, but is now horrendously expensive (like trains) in a way that's becoming politically important. The public are going to demand that something be done. AI power use is not helping here.
The less successful ones are the actual big capital asset ownership ones: RailTrack PLC, OpenReach, water companies, the nuclear industry.
Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.
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?
I do not think the problems have gone away; dealing with OpenReach is very often as kafkaesque as it would have been.
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?
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.
I mean, come on. This is HN. Aren't we supposed to be engineers here? Increasing bandwidth only matters if some useful activity is constrained by the lack of it. You can't just say more of X is always a good thing, for any X. Ignoring tradeoffs is the mistake that creates leftism, but there are always tradeoffs.
So..... not really a point for privatization here.
It seems like they had managed to bring the cost below copper:
> In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper
> we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham
But the British government was concerned:
> BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do
> So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949
This might be an argument for privatisation, because the government was still in full control of the company when they prevented the fibre rollout. Would the owner of a private company squander such an advantage over concerns for their competitors?
On the other hand, would a private company have had the capability to plan this forward in the first place? We do see that from Big Tech companies (e.g. Apple silicon) but could BT have done it under private ownership?
So I think new technology is generated through research funding, either public sector (universities) or R&D depts in private companies (today companies like Apple, previously old school companies like pre-Welch GE). I guess BT was more like the latter, except state owned.
In telecoms there's also a universal service obligation, which does not make economic sense when driven purely by profit motive. Cost of rolling out fiber to a small village will probably never be recouped. Thats why FTTH w/ Virgin Broadband was only available in cities for a long time, and expensive.
In the US where telecoms have regulatory capture, and no public access telecom network, you see stories of rural communities trying to fund their own infra. It's expensive.
Cost of rollout and universal service can be helped by rolling out at scale, building the factories, reducing unit price etc.
So all this together.... I think private companies _can_ have the foresight to do this kind of forward planning... But a big nationwide rollout of a public good? Where is their financial incentive? They would provide an environment for the acceleration of future commerce and technological development. But if they don't make money from it, why would they?
The issue was the subsidies. The fiber plan wasn't going to be profitable then or maybe ever, so it was dependent on tax funding that competitors wouldn't have access to. BT had to become an economically rational company which meant tossing not only the fiber stuff but around half their employees too. Building fiber and then giving it to OpenReach wouldn't have helped BT become competitive.
No, Cochrane was an idiot, exactly the type of central planner privatization was good for getting rid of. Look at what he's saying.
> In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper
According to a guy who hadn't done it. How do you make building out an entirely new physical network cheaper than using the existing one? What was this magic trick he found that let him snap his fingers and instantly replace all the wires in the ground? That claim just wasn't true, was it.
Lots of things in that interview were very wrong. "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form". The first patent for what became ADSL was filed in 1979. Internet access was rolled out across the existing copper network successfully for decades after that. His engineering skills were "obviously" not that great because DSL isn't an unintuitive idea, it just runs data at different frequencies on the same copper lines as voice. There were high bandwidth copper links in the 1970s already. There's lots of details involved to make it work well to consumer residences, but the concept is simple enough. He didn't research that possibility first because being a nationalized monopoly meant there was no downside to just playing with the coolest tech whilst ignoring economic rationality. He had no history of running a profit-making business, he'd spent his entire career in nationalized monopolies.
You can see the problem here:
> "It's like everything else in the electronics world, if you make one laptop, it costs billions; if you make billions of laptops it costs a few quid".
Since when do laptops cost a few quid? And the costs of FTTH aren't dominated by the cost of fiber and switches, WTF. The cost is all in the manual labor of rebuilding the physical network and upgrading the homes themselves. You can't manufacture your way to a cheap nationwide fiber network.
This kind of economic illiteracy is exactly what brought the British economy to the edge of total collapse in the 70s and caused voters to bring Thatcher in three times in a row (and maybe they'd have gone for a fourth if the Tories had let them).
He wasn't savvy with tech. I just demonstrated that. He claimed it was "patently obvious" you couldn't deliver data over copper just a few years before the tech to do it was invented.
He wasn't savvy with economics either. BT was a basket case when he was running it, which is why they had to lay off over 100,000 employees the moment they were privatized. And again, he claimed you could make FTTH cheap by scaling up cable manufacturing, which is not only economically nonsensical but is obviously nonsense to anyone who thinks about it for a moment.
The moment BT had to actually deliver value matching the prices they charged, they could no longer justify FTTH nor could anyone else, because it was irrational. That's why the project got cancelled. Stop trying to force a left wing narrative where none fits: if FTTH was such a great idea in the 1980s other companies would have done it. None did, because it was the wrong call.
In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.
The USA is the world leader in computing and many parts still have notoriously poor bandwidth to the home today. The link between home fiber and economic performance is very weak.
Bandwidth upgrades need to consider the whole equation, including cost of infra upgrades of different techniques and demand. Remember that fiber was over built during the dot-com bubble and ended up going dark because there wasn't enough demand to consume it, not even on the backbone.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
I'd say the issues today (fragmented services offerings, high prices, low speeds) are more due to under investment in the infrastructure (keeping copper for too long) - which could have just as easily happened if it was government run.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Running an airline just so you don't have opex seems a bit silly to me for example.
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.
As with everything things can be done well and can be done badly. And it really depends on this exact situation and the exact contract.
And both well done likely not that different in cost and other factors need to be included.
In terms of transparency having an isolated outside of government structure, you can potentially be more transparent as you can get detailed contracts down to item levels and have all those things be public. This is done in other nations when it comes to transport projects. But it of course depends on the government writing the contract to demand the level of transparency.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-3...
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
Imagine having one mobile phone provider.
Both Airbus and Volkswagen were set up by Governments. T-Mobile is arguably quite successful.
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.
The challenge with so many UK privatisations is that the idea of real alternatives/competition ranges from laughable to extremely laughable.
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
On energy, we have many companies competing and offering really diverse products. Octopus were once a small little upstart but they became top dog by providing decent support, incentives and new products such as tariffs that track the wholesale rate - including negative pricing. They've got a REST API that you can use to pull all kind of data out for various home automation use cases - I can't ever imagine a government run company providing that.
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.
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.