BG Group was once part of British Gas. It belonged to us all as the single state-owned supplier of gas before privatisation by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government.

Much has changed since then. While consumers still have just one gas pipe coming into their homes, they might be billed by a plethora of “suppliers.”

This multiplicity of providers epitomised the sharp competition that the new private companies were to bring at the time of privatisation.

Cut-throat competition, as the privatisation zealots told Sid and the rest of us, guaranteed better services and lower prices. It was the ABC of private enterprise.

Unfortunately, the new owners had not read the script, seeing transformation of a public monopoly into a private oligopoly as a unique opportunity to fill the boots of private shareholders and top managers at the expense of captive consumers.

Fortunately for consumers, privatisation of gas, as with other state assets handed over to the City, also saw the arrival of an all-powerful regulator with power to hold private companies to account.

But, unfortunately, without exception they have been as much use as a chocolate teapot and are collaborators in the great privatisation rip-off.

Regulators understand that the real intent of divesting the public sector of its essential, efficient and profitable assets was to make rich speculators richer still and that their job was to cluck loudly now and again without laying the golden egg of renationalisation.

So contemptuous have the privateers become of consumers and public opinion that BG Group has the temerity to announce that it will engage Helge Lund as its new chief executive with a pay package of £25 million a year.

The former head of the Norwegian energy giant Statoil — two-thirds of which remains in public hands — doesn’t come cheap.

He is set to receive a share award worth £12 million on joining, subject to shareholder approval, a relocation allowance of £480,000 and £3m to compensate for unvested bonuses.

Follow that with a basic annual salary of £1.5m, £450,000 in lieu of pension, an annual bonus of £3m and an annual long-term share grant worth up to £9m and you can understand why even Institute of Directors director general Simon Walker thinks BG is extracting the urine.

“It is a red rag to enemies of the free market,” he bleats.

You can see what he means. Many low-paid workers have had their wages frozen for the life of this Parliament, seen vital services cut and been lectured that the cash just isn’t there.

All it requires would be a few ill-intentioned outside agitators of a Bolshevik bent to start putting it about that possibly we’re not all in it together and tightening our belts in unison for ordinary decent sons and daughters of the soil to reach the conclusion that they’ve been lied to.

They might begin to show support for the call by gas union GMB for a top tax rate of 85 per cent for £1m-plus annual incomes.

People could leap to the extremist conclusion that privatisation of our public assets was a sordid stratagem to dispossess the poor of what little they owned together and to hand it over to a tiny wealthy elite.

If the electorate were to take ideas such as this to their heart and demand the return of our collective birthright, where on earth would we be?