According to the Telegraph, Priority Pass, the world’s leading independent airport lounge programme, has confirmed what many of us probably knew: Heathrow Airport is the worst in the world. It retains the title it won a year ago in the aftermath of the Terminal 5 fiasco.

Having experienced the horrors of Moscow Sheremetyevo on several occasions, the Parallax Brief can only imagine the extraordinary effort required to top the list not only once, when teething problems with a big new terminal made winning the gong a breeze, but to retain the prize after a full year of high intensity work to solve the problems.

But isn’t the abject experience to which we’re subjugated at Heathrow and many of our other airports the inevitable, yet wholly avoidable, result of the structure of the industry in Britain?

If you’re anywhere to the right of Trotsky, you’ve probably arrived at the conclusion that most of the time the private sector provides a better customer experience than the public sector. The private sector has greater incentives to do so: if it does brilliantly, it can become rich beyond avarice; poorly and it goes bust — and all the while competition forces standards ever higher, as companies scrap to outshine one another in order to win the customers’ pound.

But if there was no competition? If the business was the only provider of a service people had to use? Well, you’d get something like Heathrow, a massively inefficient, bloated service doesn’t care about the customer because it knows it owns the only alternatives.

Margaret Thatcher’s airports privatisation scheme was fundamentally flawed. Airports compete with eachother, not with other modes of transport. The Parallax Brief can’t drive to the Maldives, and many business trips are under time constraints that make other modes of transport impossible even if practicable routes existed. In effect, Thatcher replaced one monopoly with another, guaranteeing that British travellers would not be offered choice and BAA would not disciplined by market competition.

In this context, the recently announced sale of Gatwick airport is welcome. As is the UK Competition Commission’s ruling that by 2011 BAA must sell Stansted, London’s third main airport, as well as either Edinburgh or Glasgow airport.

It’s better late than never, of course, but better still would be knowing that the government and their advising civil servants will learn from this abject failure when planning the next round of privatisations.