@Wilt - I come from a time of nationalised industries. It was horrible. Working at telecommunications in London's The City I saw first hand what the state machine delivered. Crushing bureaucracy, stifled innovation (forbidden even) and workers bored out of their collective skulls, following union-mandated "Spanish practises" that would appear ludicrous today.
For example, it took a full 14 months to get a Telex line installed at our office. A telephone line would be a minimum of six months. Working for a City financial institution we could not wait this time for telecommunication services, and so it was the norm to bribe engineers to do the work. Everyone did it, or waited out the lead time.
Stifled innovation was the norm - the notion of connecting any equipment not supplied by The Post Office Telecommunications to one of their lines was abhorrent, forbidden. Fines could be levied if you were discovered. And so when private industry tried to make advances, in my case computerised Telex and message switches, these had to be connected via Post Office supplied DC3A "isolation" devices. Mounted in 6" cabinets these things were monstrous. They did nothing at all much that a simple pocket-sized filter would. One time, an engineer delivering one after a 12 month wait, was greeted by my line manager with a mild complaint. "Do you want this now or do you want to wait another 12 months?" was the humble response from the Post Office Engineer. Needless to say my manager shut up and behaved himself
So I make you right Wilt, if we were still nationalised we'd be in the dark ages.
We can see how the state still performs when we look at OFCOM. Here we have a regulator who is supposed to guide private industry, or the market, into supplying quality value services to the UK. They are supposed to make sure that we are not held back or disadvantaged by industry self-interest, every bit as damaging as the Post Office Telecommunications of old. Yet OFCOM have presided over the over-priced 3G auctions that actually hurt all of those that participated and has taken 8 years to get us to where we are today. They have presided over the current-day stalling of LTE auctions, allowing self-interest industrialists to cause delay after delay. Someone show me where OFCOM are regulating, mandating, LTE into existence so that we may at least compete with our European partners who are no doubt having a quiet chuckle at our expense.
Tricky, really.