It is hard to believe that when the UK's utilities were privatised in the 1980s the arch patriot Mrs Thatcher would have welcomed the fact they would eventually be bought by foreign-owned multinationals and that dividends from tap water in Surbiton would line the pockets of shareholders in Australia.

But then, as she displayed when she placed a handkerchief over the short-lived ‘international' logo designed for the once state-owned British Airways fleet, Mrs Thatcher was by no means signed up to global capitalism, especially when it was to the detriment of British firms.  What she wanted was British capitalism.

More recently, the vitriolic coverage of multinationals like Google or Starbucks for allegedly not paying their fair share of corporation tax reflects a growing disenchantment across the political spectrum about the lack of accountability in global capitalism.

This has started to spill over into criticism of multinationals that deliver, or rather fail to deliver, public services or allegedly over-charge.  The sub-text is that ‘maybe these big private companies aren't quite the be-all and end-all that we'd hoped.'

This government has never quite worked out its attitude to private sector providers.  On the one hand it wants to end what it sees as the waste of having lots of different small suppliers on different rates when the economies of scale from one or two big suppliers should deliver efficiencies.