Different horses for different courses. In UK all kinds of govt owned entities, telecoms, Gas, Electric , etc were privatised just so there were some potentially profitable companies for the City to play with as Britain doesn't have many real private businesses of a large scale for anyone to invest in.
Some improvements in service in some cases and some superficial improvement sin others.
Created to establish a 'shareholder democracy' the shares were alloted across a wide spectrum but rapidly ended up in City hands and then sold to European, mostly, companies in the same field (the City doesn't like anything involving capital investment-long term views , stra tegic infrastructure. etc)
At the end of the day as has been said everything is sacrificed for money in the name of shareholder value and the exec team earn 5 times what their predecessors did and the rest of the staff earn 80% of previous salaries after about a third are made redundant.
Seldom a happy ending but in the US case the often bizarre balance of equally hating the government and big business (admittedly with good reason) might keep things on an even keel and away from the bizarre US practice of shutting the federal government down every so often.
PB