I'm 40. My point is not that Thatcher was heartless, but that while she was busy privatizing a variety of state-owned UK companies (most of which desperately needed to be have their monopolies abolished), she also triggered a recurring asset-inflation/deflation cycle and popularized the idea of getting rich quick through trading up repeatedly. This culminated in a real-estate boom (& bust) after people were given permission to buy their council houses at rock-bottom prices.
Your spelling tics ('nu labour') and use of the suggestion that the party lied by promoting a policy of wider university education which turned out to be a failure suggest a rather intense bias. It seems not to have occurred to you that the Blair government thought widespread higher education was the antitode to Britain's structural economic problems and simply Got It Wrong. Likewise, there are a lot of people on the left who are convinced that Thatcher set out to wreck the economy by plundering the state monopolies, when the reality is that they were in terrible shape and the abrupt recession that followed a long period of financial expansion came as a nasty surprise for the then-ruling Conservatives under John Major.
I mean, it's fun to imagine that wicked politicians crash the economy for their own personal gain; but even a brief study of history suggests that wrecking an economy is usually followed by painful electoral defeat and a long term in the wilderness. Most politicians are not especially malicious, they're just not especially competent either. Gordon Brown looked like a magician until the financial crisis hit, and had probably come to believe he was. Likewise, Thatcher looked like a genius until there were riots in the streets and Sterling collapsed not long after her departure. If you can only remember the faults of the most recent government, then you're in danger of repeating the ones of that which came immediately before, or those of their predecessors.
It was not just a mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to monkey with the unemployment figures before an election! One the electorate fell for. Of course you could make exactly the same case about Thatcher boosting her popularity by winning the Falklands War.
The Nu Labour "project" was very cynically about power for the sake of power, using techniques hitherto reserved for selling consumer goods and pop music. Thatcher, for all her faults, was a true believer in what later became known as Thatcherism. Blair and Brown were so intent on power their whole political careers that they had absolutely no idea what to do when they got it!
Really? Have a look into Thatcher's pre-political career: her biggest achievement was finding a way to cheaply boost the volume of ice cream using an additive extracted from seaweed that was cheaper than using more milk. When you get into arguing about whether people were true ideologues or just going through the motions, you are essentially offering religious arguments. Being Irish and having later in lived in London for a decade, I have little sympathy for ideological purity as a political desideratum. All politicians are self-interested to some degree. It is naive to think you can discuss the quality of others' motives in objective terms.
Your spelling tics ('nu labour') and use of the suggestion that the party lied by promoting a policy of wider university education which turned out to be a failure suggest a rather intense bias. It seems not to have occurred to you that the Blair government thought widespread higher education was the antitode to Britain's structural economic problems and simply Got It Wrong. Likewise, there are a lot of people on the left who are convinced that Thatcher set out to wreck the economy by plundering the state monopolies, when the reality is that they were in terrible shape and the abrupt recession that followed a long period of financial expansion came as a nasty surprise for the then-ruling Conservatives under John Major.
I mean, it's fun to imagine that wicked politicians crash the economy for their own personal gain; but even a brief study of history suggests that wrecking an economy is usually followed by painful electoral defeat and a long term in the wilderness. Most politicians are not especially malicious, they're just not especially competent either. Gordon Brown looked like a magician until the financial crisis hit, and had probably come to believe he was. Likewise, Thatcher looked like a genius until there were riots in the streets and Sterling collapsed not long after her departure. If you can only remember the faults of the most recent government, then you're in danger of repeating the ones of that which came immediately before, or those of their predecessors.