I think I remember Dunlop’s losing shed loads of money, unions running riot and industrial disputes being the norm. You seem to have forgotten that a strike blighted country, ‘the sick man of Europe’ was turned around by Maggie. Yes we had to put up with a lot, but she turned it around, and even pretending she didn’t is a betrayal of history......
The collapse of British manufacturing was far more down to its management than anything else, and unfortunately the fact that Thatcher blindly took their side meant that they never got to learn how they had gone wrong (or even that they had gone wrong).
Combine that with City deregulation and you ended up with almost all sectors of our economy - but especially the high street - being ran by overpaid egotists who think they'll always be able to fix the system so that (a) they get their bonus, (b) they will never be held to account for what they have done and (c) that there is nothing they can do to the workforce that will ever be unjustified. The result of course is that many great British companies have been brought to their knees, often in circumstances that would appear criminal to most people, and we the taxpayer have been left to pick up the pieces.
I still think Blair was worse than her - for a start, he had the greatest opportunity to fix the country that any PM will ever have (edit) and he proceeded to enrich himself - but she was pretty bad.
