Just on the off chance that you meant Thatcher, let's start with the economy.
Thatcher got elected on the back of the Saatchi slogan 'Labour Isn't Working'. This is because there was, at that time, one million unemployed in the UK. For Friedman and Hayek [her 'go to' economists], the focus of macreconomic theory should be on controlling inflation. So Thatcher raised interest rates. This should lower demand as it then costs more to borrow money. Unfortunately, those higher interest rates attracted foreign capital, driving up the value of the British pound and making British exports uncompetitive.
The result was a huge recession. Unemployment soared to 3.3 million people, a significant chunk of British manufacturing was destroyed, and many traditional industrial centres were devastated.
Okay, so how about giving people a chance to own their own council houses?
Here is John Gray on that:
'...the selling-off of council houses to their tenants is often praised as a Thatcherite success story.
But in social and economic terms, the decimation of municipal housing was one of the chief elements in the emergence of a neoliberal dependency culture. Spending on housing benefit during 1996-7 was estimated at over £11 billion. This is 1.5 per cent of Britain's gross domestic product and over ten times the total cost of housing benefits in 1979-80. Public expenditure on social housing was replaced, many times over, by rent rebates and assistance with the payments of mortgages. The price of privatizing municipal housing in Britain has been a colossal increase in welfare dependency.'
