Ed, my concern would not be with Cellnet/O2 or IAG - both the mobile phone markets and airline industry have multiple companies providing competition: IAG is a holding company formed to engineer the merger of British Airways and Iberia Airlines and its stocks are traded on the London and Madrid markets, and, if my memory serves me correctly, O2 was created after BT was privatised so wasn't part of the original organisation, plus BT has now absorbed the EE mobile phone operation. I think the area of concern is where competition isn't possible - either because it isn't practicable, such as electricity, gas and water distribution, or it's limited because of the existing extensive infrastructure of the previously state organisation that makes it difficult for new competitors to build a competing one, such as BT's core trunk network or it's premises connections managed by OpenReach, and the Royal Mail's national distribution and home delivery services. Those are ones that need to be protected by strong regulation to prevent transfer of control abroad, which does seem to have happened in the case of some energy and water companies.You're correct, the UK never set up a sovereign fund in the same way Norway did. If I remember correctly in the early days of the UK oil industry (circa mid 70s) the then Labour government set up the British National Oil Corporation which was both an operator (for example, of the Thistle field) and a regulator of other operators (for example, of Mobil
in the Beryl field) and that would have been the basis for creating a UK sovereign fund. My understanding was that the Thatcher government elected in 1979 abandoned that idea, but that is stretching my memory!
Michael Ixer ● 952d