Just fuming (again) whenever I hear about the deal to build Hinkley Point C. Certainly the specifics of the arrangement are a disaster for the British taxpayer, but I have a deeper concern because I worked for the pre-privatised electricity industry (the CEGB), actually in the nuclear part.
This should (but it never gets brought up on the news) be a constant reminder of the folly of selling off all our national industries, and for a fraction of their actual value I might add. And has it saved the taxpayer / energy consumer any money in the long term? No, it wrecked a perfectly viable British industry and put it in the hands of, well allegedly privatised interests but how many of the British voters actually realise that the industries are actually still nationalised - but now run for the benefit of the Chinese and French state instead of ours! It seems that everyone is allowed to benefit apart from the British public. It makes me quite nauseous to be honest.
And then when these "privatised" (using the term very loosely of course) industries fail to strategically plan for stuff like future production requirements, who sorts it out - yes subsidy from the British taxpayer!!! You couldn't make it up. It's not really privatised business at all, it's the British government subsidising the French and Chinese (who incidentally will now have strategic control over a vital UK commodity). Meanwhile the benefit we apparently get is a completely incomprehensible bill and the need to go to specialist firms to change "suppliers" for us (even though the power probably comes from the same power station). I would love someone in government to explain how the current situation is better than when the CEGB produced electricity, we had a generating surplus (even exporting electricity to France by the way), and an industry that designed and built our own power stations.