That's a fairly literal description of how privatization worked, yes. That's why British Steel is owned by Tata and the remains of British Leyland ended up with BMW. British nuclear reactors are operated by Electricite de France, and some of the trains are run by Dutch and German operators.

It sounds bad, but you can also not-misleadingly say "we took industries that were costing the taxpayer money and sold them for hard currency and foreign investment". The problem is the ongoing subsidy.

> That's why British Steel is owned by Tata

British Steel is legally owned by Jingye, but the UK government has taken operational control in 2025.

> the remains of British Leyland ended up with BMW

The whole of BL represented less than 40% of the UK car market, at the height of BL. So the portion that was sold to BMW represents a much smaller amount smaller share of the UK car market. I would not consider that “the UK politicians selling an industry to foreigners”.

At the risk of changing topics/moving goalposts, I don’t know that your examples of European govts or companies owning or operating businesses or large parts of an industry in another European country is in thr spirit of the European Union. Isn’t the whole idea to break down barriers where the collective population of Europe benefit?