My point was the uselessness of nationalised industries compared to imporvements driven by private enterprise
One might point to, for example, the nationalised British computer industry (ICL). And the nationalised (for all practical purposes) British micro electronics industry (Inmos).
And then look at the fantastic success of the wholly private ARM.
What happened to British nationalised industries was that they were forced by government to do things that were commercially suicidal, and in the end the government's willing to underwrite losses was less than the government's desire to impose loss-making strategies. The best example is air liners. The VC10 was a potentially world-class design. But a combination of nationalised BOAC and nationalised (for practical purposes) Vickers were forced to modify the design to handle commercial basket-case "hot and high" routes that BOAC wouldn't have operated given the choice and Vickers wouldn't have built an aircraft for given the choice.
The VC10 ended up as a massively noisy, complex, expensive design which could operate from hot and high rough airstrips in the former Empire (the reason for the government's insistence on the capability) but was so noisy and expensive it wasn't viable for profitable routes. It lasted as a military transport until a few years ago precisely because of this capability, but airlines ran screaming for their nearest Boeing salesman, even though it meant paying in dollars.
The same argument applies to the computers. Was ICL there to build competitive computers, or to provide jobs in Manchester? No-one knew, but a circular firing squad arose so that British universities were hobbled by being forced to buy obsolescent, labour-intensive designs (1900s? In the late 1970s? Seriously?) which meant that the whole British science and engineering community suffered in exchange for a few hundred jobs in West Gorton. The moment they could buy something else, they did, and the whole scheme unravelled.
Nationalised industries built products no-one really wanted to sell to customers who weren't given a choice. It could have been better (the US poured vast amounts of money into IBM and Boeing via defence contracts, but let them use the profit to build commercially viable products) but Britain micro-managed these companies into the ground.
