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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
The Birth of Privatization 1
Excerpted and adapted from The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, 1998 ed.,
pp. 114-124. Copyright © 1998 by Daniel A. Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. Reprinted by permission of
Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y. All rights reserved.
Britain's Labor Party politicians had promoted state-owned enterprise, before and after World
War II, as an almost altruistic undertaking. "The public corporation must be no mere capitalist
business, the be-all and end-all of which is profits and dividends," Herbert Morrison, the Labor
politician who had so much influence on the postwar nationalization program, had said. "Its
board and its officers must regard themselves as the high custodians of the public interest."
But in practice, argued [Conservative Party Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with Keith
Joseph and the others who shared their views], that higher vision could not be attained. Was
government going to be any better in figuring out the future than private business? It did not
have access to a higher level of knowledge. Indeed the Thatcherites disbelieved in
government knowledge. As Lawson put it, governments "enjoy no unique hot line to the
future." The record suggested just the opposite—inflexibility in the face of change.
Whatever the vision, state companies had often proved in practice to be highly ill efficient,
inflexible, poorly performing employment agencies, politically pressured to maintain and
expand employment far beyond what was needed. They were also unable to resist the wage
pressure from public-sector unions, thus becoming major generators of inflation. Because of
their inefficiency, their weakness in the face of union pressure, and their insulation from
competition in the marketplace, they piled up huge losses, which they solved by turning to the
taxpayers or, as Lawson put it, by "recourse to the bottomless public purse." Every kind of
decision ran the risk of becoming a political decision, driven not by the interests of the firm
but by the desires of politicians in power, whether it was wage settlements or new
investments in plant location, major projects, and equipment. What was missing was exactly
what the Labor promoters of national industries had most disliked—the discipline of the
market. "What public ownership does," Lawson declared in 1982, "is to eliminate the threat of
takeover and ultimately of bankruptcy, and the need, which all private undertakings have from
time to time, to raise money from the market." Public ownership British-style also meant that
The Birth of Privatization 2
output and products were not adapted to the marketplace and that the needs and desires of
the consumer, the buyer, did not count for all that much.
For the Thatcherites, privatization became a cause.... Widening ownership and thus giving
people a vested interest in private property would change the political culture of the nation. It
would decisively limit the role of the state and make at least part of the Thatcher agenda
virtually irreversible. It would also make the companies themselves more efficient and deliver
more value to consumers. It would eliminate the industries' call on the "bottomless purse" and
reduce government's share of the GNP. And, by the way, it would provide for a considerable
inflow of money that would in turn, help finance tax cuts.
With all that said, there was never a sense that privatization had broad popular support. For
their part, civil servants did nothing to hinder the process. Their experience with the stateowned
companies in the 1970s had been so painful that even those intellectually attracted to
the mixed economy had come in practice to despair of its proper functioning. Moreover, they
did not have any good alternatives to offer. The traditional ideas were exhausted. "One of the
real driving forces for privatization," recalled Thatcher Cabinet minister John Wakeham, "was
the consensus among bureaucrats that they did not know how to determine anything
anymore. Planning, nationalization, and so on—it had all failed. The state-owned industries
were running massive deficits. There was willingness to try something new. You found that the
response within the bureaucracy to the new conservative government was that it could not get
any worse than it had already got."
Keith Joseph initiated privatization at the Department of Industry, and on the first day of the
new government, he appointed David Young to be his special advisor on privatization. "The big
risk was that we had to get companies into a fit state to be privatized, " said Young. "It turned
out that it was not the commanding heights of the economy but rather clapped-out coal mines
and other industries that were losing lots of money. We intended to sell off those that could be
sold, and meanwhile work on the others to reduce losses, to do the necessary closures, to
establish management."
In such circumstances, the initial steps toward privatization would be rather modest compared
to what carne later. Cable & Wireless and British Aerospace were among the first. Also
disposed of were gas stations along motorways, hotels belonging to the state-owned railway
The Birth of Privatization 3
system, and a company that manufactured radioactive isotopes for medical treatment. As it
turned out, the most significant form of privatization in the early years was the sale of
"council" (i.e., public) housing units to the people who lived in them.
After the Falklands War, the government had the muscle to begin to privatize what were truly
the commanding heights of the economy. But one of the biggest difficulties, Lawson recalled,
"was the fact that, to all intents and purposes, it had never been done before.... [T]here was
no departmental dossier to dust down." There were many questions to decide. Should shares
in the companies be distributed free to all citizens? Emphatically not, said Chancellor Lawson,
citing the American revolutionary patriot Tom Paine: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem
too lightly." How to price the shares so that they were not too high (discouraging investors)
and not too low (meaning that the government would give up too much value) but still—of
critical importance—low enough to ensure that the prices would go up, not down, after the
initial offering? How to foster incentives for employees and small investors to buy into the
"float"? To facilitate that desire, they created a series of television commercials that urged a
fictional modern Everyman named Sid not to miss this chance to become a shareholder.
One of the most urgent challenges, it turned out, was to create meaningful and accurate
financial histories for the companies that corresponded to conventional and intelligible
accounting standards. "When we first examined the nationalized British Telecom," said
Lawson, "we discovered that, in true East European style, the corporation had not the faintest
idea which of its activities were profitable and which were not, let alone any finer points of
management accounting." Added David Young, "British Telecom was a total mess...."
This pointed to a larger challenge. Companies could not be privatized until they had been
"fixed"—loss-making activities reduced, organization restructured, and the basis for
profitability established. Otherwise, why would anybody buy stock in the enterprise? British
Steel would prove to be an excellent case study. The company lost over $10 billion from the
mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. Restructuring was first undertaken to stem the draw on
public funds. Only in the 1980s did privatization become a goal. By the time the company was
finally sold to the public, its labor force had already been drastically reduced and its
productivity dramatically increased, its facilities rationalized. And it was profitable—and
internationally competitive.
The Birth of Privatization 4
But there were also special cases with issues that went beyond the "bottom line." How, for
instance, when it came to "strategic" assets like oil, to ensure that they did not fall into foreign
hands? After all, privatization was following only a few years after the oil crises of the 1970s,
which had, in the first place, precipitated the partial nationalization of North Sea oil. On this
subject Lawson proved to be very creative. He recalled "the curious voting structures" he had
encountered a decade earlier, when working as a stock market columnist for the Financial
Times, that enabled someone with a "very small slice of equity to exercise quite
disproportionate power." As a journalist he had been disapproving. But as a politician he found
it a godsend. Thus he came up with the "golden share"—"a special share which would be
retained by government after privatization, and which would enable the government to
prevent control of the company from falling into unsuitable hands." The term "unsuitable" was
a euphemism for "foreign." However euphemistic, it did the political trick.
Ultimately, the Thatcher government was able to carry out a privatization program far bigger
than anyone would have expected at the start, and one that pushed back the frontiers of the
state. In 1982 and 1984, the government's ownership share in North Sea oil and gas was
privatized, creating among other things Enterprise Oil, today one of the world's largest
independent oil companies. The government disposed of its share in British
Petroleum—acquired by Winston Churchill on the eve of the first world war. Ports and airports
were privatized. Heathrow and other airports are now owned and operated by a private
company, BAA, which also operates airports in the United States.
The first truly massive privatization was the hiving off of the state telephone system into
British Telecom.... The telephone system, part of the post office until separated by Keith
Joseph, embodied many of the worst traits of state-owned companies. Bureaucratic state
control repressed innovation. The customer did not count. It took months to get a new
telephone. There were only two choices—the design offered or nothing. The only way to get a
phone fixed in any reasonable time was to pay a repairman, who freelanced after hours, under
the table. The red call boxes were relatively rare, sometimes malodorous, and often out of
order.
The Birth of Privatization 5
"When we went into the telephone offices to talk to the staff," David Young recalled, "they
talked about office conditions, pensions, and many other things. No one ever mentioned the
customers. If British Telecom wanted to move a group out of a run-down office building into a
new building, unions extorted compensation—a few hundred pounds for each employee for the
'disturbance' of giving them better working conditions. And when it came to installing new
phones, they came along when they were damn well ready."
The actual privatization of British Telecom took place in November 1984. The first tranche,
just over 50 percent, was sold to the public for $6 billion. A huge popular market for
privatization had been created. Curiously enough, the public's complaints about service rose
after the privatization, but with good reason. "In the good old days before privatization, no
one complained because there was no point," Young said. "No one was listening." Now there
was someone to complain to. British Gas, British Airways, and British Steel followed. Later
came British Coal and British Rail. The state-owned water system was privatized in the form of
a series of regional water companies. Most massive of all was the breakup of the state-owned
electric power monopoly into 12 regional distribution companies, three generating companies,
and one open-access grid company.
The process of privatization encountered many criticisms over a decade and a half. With the
larger transactions, there always seemed to be a refrain that the capital markets would not be
able to absorb the deal. In practice, that never proved to be a constraint. The pricing of stock
was generally criticized for being either too low or too high. Former Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan, the Tory proponent of the mixed economy and the middle way, weighed in to voice
the complaints of many when he declared that the "family silver"—the state companies, all of
whose names began with British—was being sold off. The obvious reply was that the "family"
could not afford to maintain the silver anymore.
Some pointed out that a number of the state-owned companies had become more efficient
and raised their productivity prior to privatization Here the reply was that those improvements
were driven by necessity, by the discipline and pressure of impending privatization. After the
fact, the growth in compensation—salary and options—of senior managers and board
members in the newly privatized companies became a hot staple on front pages, made all the
more vivid by the sharp downsizing in employment levels in what had formerly been the
The Birth of Privatization 6
woefully overmanned state companies. The recipients of these benefits became immortalized
as the "fat cats" and the target of popular rage. Employment in many privatized companies
was often slashed by 20 to 40 percent. Beyond question, the quality of service improved and
operations became more efficient. But it would be difficult for many of those who lost their
jobs—often late in their careers—to find new opportunities. The rationalization that
privatization brought about fed for a time a growing tide of unemployment in the new "lean"
Britain. Yet the growth in unemployment proved temporary. By the late l990s unemployment
was much lower than on the European continent.
Privatization also introduced the new challenge of regulation. The nationalized industries had
operated under the control—often ineffective, to be sure—of the government ministries. Now
the provision of basic public services—gas, electricity, water—was being entrusted to private
enterprises guided by profitability, not universal service at any cost. To work, this new system
required a regulatory body that could ensure competition and protect the consumer. The
establishment of such regulation was essential to public acceptance of the new arrangements.
Sure that they could improve on the American experience, the Tories sought a solution that
would keep regulation as "lite" as possible while still being effective. After all, excessively
burdensome or interventionist structures would run counter to the goal of making government
smaller. So they appointed for each industry a single individual—known as "The
Regulator"—with the mandate to monitor industry practice and set pricing rules with as lean a
staff as possible.
But what started out as "regulatory lite" soon grew into much larger regulatory
establishments. There had been an underestimation of the regulatory needs posed by the
movement from state monopoly to private firms. The risks of private monopolies or
"duopolies" forming were great; and on the technical side, the sophisticated pricing
mechanisms for industries such as electric power proved complex to run and monitor. For all
these reasons, the original conception of "The Regulator" came under fire, and a drift began
instead toward full-fledged regulatory agencies, some staffed by hundreds of people....
By 1992, some two-thirds of state-owned industries had moved into the private sector.
Altogether, 46 major businesses, with 900,000 employees, had been privatized, and the
government's take was well over $30 billion. What was once a massive drain on the public
The Birth of Privatization 7
purse had turned into a major source of tax revenue. The number of people owning shares
tripled to nine million—20 percent of the adult population—although many of those nine
million owned only a few shares. But the most important consequence of privatization was
that, together with labor union reform, it changed the basic institutional relationships that had
defined Britain since 1945—and that had brought the country to a standstill by 1979. In that
year, 1,274 working days were lost to strikes for every thousand people working. By 1990,
that figure was down to 108—less than one-tenth. The political and economic culture in Britain
had been permanently altered; Keith Joseph's intellectual revolution had, in good measure and
despite all the controversies, worked. David Young, the would-be emigrant of 1975, was four
years later Keith Joseph's special advisor and then, under Margaret Thatcher, a member of the
Cabinet. Looking back from today's perspective, he said, "The Thatcher years turned the
United Kingdom from being a producer-led into a consumer-led economy, and it was becoming
a competitive economy. Conviction drove the process."
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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