trisher you are looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Under nationalisation the railways were starved of investment, trains were unreliable, dirty and ran late. I was a commuter in the south east and I had to get a train half an hour earlier than necessary to get to work on time.
As an electricity customer in a rural area in the busy south east, we had endless power cuts. If you wanted a phone you could wait years. Energy prices were high and again investment was low.
Having said that I do believe that some industries should be in public ownership - and that includes gas, electricity and water, but old style nationalisation led, almost without exception, to poor management and a lack of proper investment.
People may not have been lining their pocket sbut just as much money was wasted running poor, inefficient service.
I can remember contacting British Gas at this time of year at the start of a cold winter. We were about to move into a house that had stood empty for 6 months and we could not light the boiler. I explained that I had 2 small children, the youngest only 6 months old. No matter what I said they said they could not possibly visit to fix the boiler in under a fortnight. Thankfully, DH dickered with it and finally managed to start it.