She was a rather funny addition to the UK, the concept of selling off publically owned entities to the private sector without the people that paid taxes towards them getting any return, pretty much paying into a pot you could no longer piss in?
I remember those days. Billed as selling the assets to the ordinary people, it turned out that every time it was the "ordinary people" that had their requests drastically scaled back because the big institutions had already reserved a huge chunk for themselves with the agreement and connivance of the government. I did at least manage to "piss in a few of these pots" before the big institutions took them away, and did quite well. I avoided the BP selloff, and it turned out to be one hell of an expensive flop, so the big institutions did at least once get their just desserts.
The problem with this was that they were all deliberately sold at below the market value, so for the big insitutions, it was virtually a no lose scenario, but they played up the risks so that the government caved in to their demands. Had the ordinary people been given what they had asked for, with institutions only getting what was left over, it would have been of far more benefit to ordinary people, and many would have ended up with decent holdings, making them more likely to have kept them for the longer term. Instead, many ended up with such small holdings that keeping them long term just wasn't viable, and the companies themselves suffered as they still had to treat their million plus small shareholders the same as the big ones, which meant an obligation to send them all the weighty documents such as annual reports, AGM notices, etc. The result was an active campaign designed to persuade small shareholders to sell off their holdings, with the result that soon the whole lot was back in the hands of the big institutions, who then started making the serious money from it.
It's about to happen again, the Royal Mail is being "privatised" soon. As before, the best way for the masses to make money is to subscribe, and then almost immediately sell them on to a big institution. This will work provided that the government again prices them "to go" for political reasons, rather than at close to market value.