Re: It needs to stop
Thatcher inherited a economy where shipbuilding, aircraft manufacture, the railways, the post office (the GPO was also BT), coal mining, every utility, etc, etc etc had all been bought by the government and was in public ownership. Pretty much all of these industries were also loss making, and the country was literally bankrupt and had to go with the begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund in 1976.
A combination of the unions striking, only having electricity for 3 days a week and the winter of discontent in 1979 led to Labour losing the election in 1979 rather badly and the British public putting Thatcher in with a mandate to sort out the mess. Her solution was devastatingly simple, privatise everything and let it all sink or swim.
It's quite fashionable among the kids today to pretend that the country was a Socialist paradise which was working perfectly, only to be single handedly destroyed by Thatcher. It is rather rare for anybody to suggest any alternative course of action that Thatcher could have taken that would have been viable other than "privatise it all and let the public choose who they want to use".
Personally, I think it's a travesty that civil servants are giving work to companies who they know are going to subcontract it ten times and end up with a crap job done. It appears obvious that the job should be given directly to a contractor who will be responsible for the job, and frankly I think pretty much everybody would support this sort of reform.
I would also quite happily support a state sponsored company competing in an open market on fair terms. If that company is inherently superior, then it'd end up picking up most of the market. The only justification for a public owned monopoly though is a tacit admission that the state has been, is, and will always be crap at running a company precisely because knowing that you will lose your job if you do a sufficiently shit job compared to the competition tends to focus minds.
Knowing that you have a job for life no matter how crap a job you do has proven to be a dead end in this country when tried previously and I personally have no great desire to try it again unless somebody can explain (and preferably demonstrate in the marketplace) what they are going to do differently to the utter failures delivered previously at extreme cost to the taxpayer.