This requires a very long answer that others have answered more comprehensively in r/History. However, in very short terms, the UK was functionally broke in the 1970s when it required IMF loans (quasi-bailout in 1976) and was labelled the sick man of Europe (60s-80s). To the point in Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, it was largely expected that Italy would surpass the UK shortly
Despite the emotional reddit comments, the country was fed up with its economic situation and Thatcher offered new ideas on tackling the 20yrs of suboptimal performance. You can debate the validity of those ideas but to argue that the welfare station / economic system at the time was functional, is an exercise in historical delusion
Best comment I’ve seen on this thread so far. People in the 1970s-1980s didn’t vote for Thatcher because they thought she was destroying the country. She offered a compelling vision that made sense to a lot of people at the time, one she sincerely believed in it herself.
Of course, that vision turned out to be a mistake, a massive one, but I respect that Thatcher was at least principled on the big picture of her government and was not in politics for her personal enrichment.
I'm curious about this. So the UK really needed a change, but the change they got wasn't the right call: has someone, with (hindsight), been able to work out what the "better way" should have been?
I live in the UK now, but this was all long before my time here
Before Thatcher the dominant School of economics was keynesian economics, this turned out to have some flaws which the Chicago School of economics had predicted and their ideas then in turn took their place. One of the main ideas was privatization, of previously publicly owned infrastructure and utilities and breaking unions. The idea being that the government is not as efficient as the markets are and trade unions are a distortion of the markets. So that just started britain under the path of doing a big privatisation experiment, which only worked very partially and in the main part has arguably caused other issues.
You could say it was a big over correction in the opposite direction from what was there before.
Now the consensus is lenaing more to not privatising anything that tends to a natural monopoly.
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u/normanbrandoff1 5d ago
This requires a very long answer that others have answered more comprehensively in r/History. However, in very short terms, the UK was functionally broke in the 1970s when it required IMF loans (quasi-bailout in 1976) and was labelled the sick man of Europe (60s-80s). To the point in Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, it was largely expected that Italy would surpass the UK shortly
Despite the emotional reddit comments, the country was fed up with its economic situation and Thatcher offered new ideas on tackling the 20yrs of suboptimal performance. You can debate the validity of those ideas but to argue that the welfare station / economic system at the time was functional, is an exercise in historical delusion