Nationalisation isn’t about driving profit but about service – Yorkshire Post Letters

Peter Rickaby (Letters, October 5, 2022) rather misses the point in his barbed correspondence on Labour and nationalisation, when his rhetorical flourish demands to know when a nationalised industry last made a profit.

The idea is that these corporations are not driven by the profit motive, something that demands that directors and managers turn away from the business of delivering a service to home in on how to placate shareholders and pay them dividends.

It can be argued that the focus on profit led privatised water companies blithely to pump sewage into our seas and energy companies to profiteer off the back of a global crisis.

The question of efficiency is one that needs to be considered by both public and private companies. Recent experiences suggest that the pursuit of profit draws management’s attention away from the shop floor where the business gets done and sees it transfixed by the bottom line in the ledger. Not terribly efficient as an approach.