Brits, Just what was so bad about Margaret Thatcher?

[bobalot]

Yeah, the "non-parasitic" south (the City) of the U.K has done such an awesome job of late, getting the largest taxpayer bailouts in the United Kingdom's history that will take literally generations to pay off.

Firstly, this is twenty years later, the fact that the City now is as bad as the unions then isn't relevant to discussion of Thatcher. Note that it was Labour who bailed out the banks; they never met a massive government subsidy they didn't like, regardless of which industry it's in.

"New" Labour simply continued the policies of Thatcher in regards to the City. It doesn't change the fact that she started it all, along with Reagan in the United States. Your point that it was Labour that bailed them out is also a mere quibble. If the Conservatives were in power, there would be no chance they would allow the financial sector to collapse and hail in a depression. Whoever was in charge would have bailed the banks out. In fact, before the GFC Conservative members of parliament were were hailing Ireland as a great example of financial deregulation.

Secondly, the south is not the City of London. The Thames valley and the south coast contain the majority of the UK's high-tech companies, both manufacturing and services.

No, but as you point out below it is the major part of the U.K's economy due to her "reforms" and strong pound policy. In fact, it could be argued that its prominence is far too big relative to the economy.

They factually didn't and still don't. 'Could' is irrelevant fantasy.

]Those industries were a write off. Any money that could have been used to modernise them (e.g. replace aging plant equipment) had long since been handed out to unions as pay bonuses. There was literally no way to fix them, and that left the financial sector as the only serious option for powering economic growth.

It doesn't change the fact when she demolished these industries overnight and turned these regions into some of the most impoverished places in Europe she implemented a strong pound policy that ensured nothing viable could grow in its place (I noticed you ignored that). She literally threw millions of people and almost a third of the children in these regions into poverty (probably more as it was more concentrated in these regions) and had no plan for producing employment in these regions and in fact implemented policies that ensured the opposite. I can see no greater abdication of responsibility of government to its people.

Australia hailed in a decade of reforms over the same period and the old industries were phased out and a nearly of a third of Australian children didn't have to live in poverty.

Which worked fairly well, and of course produced the extra tax revenue that allowed Labour to go on a massive public sector spending spree in the late 90s.

What Labour spent its money on is irreverent to this topic. After the GFC, we can now tell these extra "profits" were bullshit. They were bullshit profits that never existed. Just like the "profits" of the American financial industry over the last 20 years after its deregulation in the 80's.

[The Guid]

From my point of view the reason I dislike Thatcher is because a lot of the short term policies that made her popular at the time are coming back to bite my generation on the arse.

Her selling off of council houses cheap may have made her popular with one generation, because they became home owners very easily. In not allowing councils to use the revenue to create more social housing however she helped to create the situation where there is a small stock of council housing, and thus many of my generation are thrilled to be in the position of renting from people who were able to buy housing when it was a massively appreciating asset. To give her all the blame for this is wrong, but she shares part of it.

Similarly she privatised many industries rapidly which actually flooded the market for cheap investment opportunities which made it less likely that people would invest in private enterprise because there were better things to spend capital on, which helped to contribute to a lower amount of manufacturing and industry coming out of the '80s. Again to blame her for this exclusively is wrong - there were some stubborn unions that didn't help, and it wasn't as if New Labour ushered in a golden age for any of the above, but that doesn't mean I give her the thumbs up.