I won't disagree that Thatcher was a cold hearted callous cow, or that her rigid monetarism policies were flawed.
However, I will disagree with the lefts revisionist view of Britain's economy pre Thatcher which endevours to absolve itself of any of the blame in Britain's demise.
Britain was already in the knackers yard.
The country in the mid-1970s had witnessed the strikes and power shutdowns of the “three-day week”, a stock-market crash, a secondary banking crisis, tough credit controls and the humiliation of its begging mission to the IMF for a loan. “Britain is a tragedy” Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, lamented to President Gerald Ford, “it has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing.”
It had also resorted to high taxation. By the decade’s end, the standard rate of income tax was 33 per cent, the upper rate, 83 per cent. Businesses were hit by corporation tax at 52 per cent. Talent voted with its feet, bringing the expression “brain drain” into vogue.
Nurses and ambulance drivers were on strike. Old people’s homes and schools were closing. The railways were not running. The electricians’ union marked the approach of Christmas 1978 by taking both BBC One and BBC Two off the air. The country was left with just ITV, to watch (the electricians waited until August 1979 to switch off ITV for 75 days).
More seriously, rubbish was piling high in the streets, creating a health hazard. The most potent metaphor of national decay was in Liverpool. There, a factory was being turned over to storage space for the dead because members of the GMWU union were picketing the cemeteries. Contingency plans were made to bury the city’s rotting corpses at sea.
On January 15 1979, Shore joined the prime minister, James Callaghan, and the rest of the Labour cabinet to discuss whether the national situation had deteriorated so seriously that troops should be brought onto the streets and a State of Emergency
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... e-her.html
Yes, it was well hunky dory for Britain back in the 70 's 
as you can see. The fact is, when she was elected, Thatcher inherited an economy stuffed full of over-manned, state subsidised and union-run industries which were more often than not running at a loss calculated in millions which at the time, was a lot.
if your not content with the "torygraph", have it said from Jamie Reed, Labour MP!
The eulogies and condemnation following Baroness Thatcher’s death are coalescing into two clear truths. The first is that her legacy will always be contested: the nationwide reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s death – if viewed honestly – is one of embittered polarisation.
The second is that the British Left must always recognise the pivotal role it played in enabling Thatcher to succeed and prosecute a political programme that damaged so many of the people that progressive politics exists to serve. The lessons of Labour’s failures during the dominant Thatcher period are as relevant today as they were during her time in office.
The British Left fostered, enabled and created Thatcher’s premiership. But since her death, nowhere in the admonition of her time in power from left-wing critics is there any acknowledgement of their own side’s failure immediately before and during the Thatcher years. Honesty is a two-way street.
This week, I spoke with a veteran of that period who served in the trenches of Walworth Road. ‘I’ll never forget how we insisted on making it easier for her,’ he told me. A press officer from the pre-spin days, he recalled spending days searching out officially-sanctioned Labour Party election posters calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament and gleefully ripping down and shredding every one he could find.
Equally when trade unionists – and I am proud to be one – recall the vituperative attacks upon them and all that then followed, they must also recognise the pivotal role of the trade unions in destroying the Callaghan government. Labour’s civil war ushered in a period of Conservative rule lasting almost two decades; during which the party became the political equivalent of Pavlov’s Dog.
The painful truth of that period is that both the Labour Party and the Labour Movement was a wretched, shambolic, incoherent wreck which guaranteed successive Thatcher victories. For so many of us on the centre-left of British politics, the rightful denunciation of the economic and social suffering causd by Margaret Thatcher to so many millions in so many parts of our country – both North and South – must be accompanied by this acknowledgement: an unelectable Labour Party allowed this to happen.
Never again. Margaret Thatcher is one of the principal reasons I chose to enter politics. Fear of the left’s amnesia in assessing the reasons for her electoral success is one of the principal reasons keeping me here.
Jamie Reed is Labour MP for Copeland.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/jreed/2013 ... r-succeed/
Statistics: Posted by Kenny Kan — Sun Apr 14, 2013 12:32 pm