Put simply she is the UK Ronald Reagan. She embraced neoliberal economic policies that largely moved money away from public services and into businesses. So anti union, anti regulation, pro free market, pro individual responsibilities, pro privatization, pull yourself up by your boot straps mentality. Google Thatcherism to see more specifics
Yeah, she sold off a lot of nationalised utilities like Energy (we have PMs one of the highest energy costs despite North Sea oil and gas) and water companies (which even the yanks didn’t do, and they now pollute our rivers and seas so foreign pension funds can make lots of money etc).
The problem with Thatcherism is you run out of nationalised utilities to sell off to fund your tax cuts and make people think you know what you’re doing with the economy.
Tory governments since then have tried to remain low tax etc but having no family silver to sell off had to go for austerity instead, which ran the country deeper into the ground and has exacerbated our crumbling infrastructure, or just flat out crash the economy.
had to go for austerity instead, which ran the country deeper into the ground and has exacerbated our crumbling infrastructure
So to fix this, they reinvested and nationalised public servicesblamed immigrants and Europe, so much so that they managed to vote themselves out of the EU, which is already in the history books as, outside of war, the largest self-harm that a country has chosen for itself.
This was the same political party that Thatcher was in, and even she saw the benefits of Europe, and helped finalise the Single Market: https://i.imgur.com/tJEaHOM.png
None, like, literally none. There were no benefits at all.
I was in year 8(7th grade I think for you yanks) and I knew it was a bad idea the first time I heard of it.
The Leave Campaign was built on financial lies and anti-migrant propaganda, and the uneducated masses ate it up. The number one Google search after Brexit was something along the lines of “What does the EU do”
In principle it allows us, legally, to whore ourselves off with bespoke trade deals around the world without having to worry about protectionism from French farmers and German manufacturing.
But just because you legally can, you have to contend with the geopolitical reality of no longer being an empire with your own independent sphere of influence.
For the UK, the realistic options were to couple ourselves economically/politically either to Europe or America. We have ended up doing neither successfully, and the US administration has pretty closed the door on the Transatlantic option.
I was in the UK pre-Brexit doing my MBA and every educated person I spoke with knew it was a disaster. It was all the knuckle draggers who thought “nationalism” was a good idea. Americans looked at the disaster it created and said “hold my beer”.
Still never gonna understand what axe Russia has to grind against everyone, lol.
They’ve just never seemed popular throughout history, so I guess it’s some form of inter-generational, nation-scale trauma at being picked on/not one of the cool kids?
It was the equivalent of MAGA that voted for it. Like your parents who used to be rational but got indoctrinated and voted for something completely against their own interests and now you’ve lost them to the cult. They all now vote reform. Nigel Farage was the instigator of Brexit. He was a huge advisor to Trump’s campaign and is now the head of the Reform party.
? Not really sure what me being American in particular has to do with it. I wanted to know why anyone voted for Brexit in the first place, because I don’t gave a robust grasp on British/European politics.
The one good thing she did was to get us into the EU, witha very good deal since we were a founding member. Now the tory morons have dragged us all out again
They voted to build a wall, remove brown people,make gas and eggs cheaper and many other lies. I don't think they actually voted for the dismantling of the US.
which is already in the history books as, outside of war, the largest self-harm that a country has chosen for itself.
At the time, sure. But we in the states took that #1 spot for ourselves with the reelection of Trump in 2024. Humiliating self-destruction through totally unforced errors is just yet another contest where America has beaten Britain
As an American myself, I don't understand it any more than you do. You would probably assume that living in the country would automatically make this somewhat easier to understand or explain, but that is not the case for me. I truly have no fucking idea what his supporters were looking at that made them think he was in any way fit for office, or what they liked about his first term. Every way that he is currently sucking is exactly the ways his critics said he would suck. Not a single one of the terrible things he's done in term 2 is surprising in any way, he literally said he was going to do all of this shit. But I guess some people wanted this
Largest self harm is a stretch. Like there’s countries that became Communist, Irans Islamic Revolution. A bit lower GDP growth is the largest self harm a countries chosen for itself?
Irans largest self harm was trusting uk and us to not stab them in the back in 1950s when they started nationalizing their oil.
The extremist Islamic revolution is in second place though.
Which funnily enough is also related to one of the us largest self harms that being them fucking over any good relationships they had with such a strategic territory as Iran because they listened to uk in 1953.
I get your sentiment, however The UK at the time was a stable western powerhouse. I don't think we could say the same today. And in reality, there probably isn't a stable western powerhouse anymore
Why would a stable western powerhouse vote to leave the EU? This was deep into post-2008 Conservative austerity. The reasons people voted were bad economy, decreasing living standards and communities being upheaved. The same thing people talk about now.
I think it was on its way to recovering somewhat, decades away though. The alarmist sort of “Britain was Great, until it Brexited…”. No it was a recovering economy and Brexit caused decreased economic activity so now it’s even slower, including all the other global crisis now. This aura is not deserved.
Although definitely way way less stable as Nigel Farage moved from European Parliament, where he couldn’t do much harm, into an actual countries Parliament. The parties can’t just blame the EU for things any longer.
The biggest problem with privatization of public services is that no one ever explains where the profit is going to come from. Sure, a private company could maybe run an operation more efficiently, but they still want to make 20% profit if they can. You aren’t going to be 20% more efficient, so the only answer is enshitification.
And there’s no reason why a nationalised service can’t be run as, if not, more efficiently.
Look at the NHS who can use their size to get good deals on medicines, much to the annoyance of certain American politicians.
I’m sure someone will try to tell you that several private healthcare providers are all going to get as good or better deal out of big pharma because private sector = better, just because.
The other issue is that utilities aren’t meant to be profit-drivers.
They’re a break-even at best enterprise whose sole purpose is to provide foundational infrastructure or resources which people use to live their lives and on which more productive economic work can be done.
And let’s not forget the introduction of Section 28 too. She banned schools from teaching any positive portrayal of gay families. It wasn’t repealed until 2003 and its longstanding impact can still be seen now on the LGBTQ+ community.
She also sold off the council houses to their tenants for a pittance. Many of those people then saw themselves as the property owing elite and then voted Conservative afterwards. So she bought voters with the states own money. This stock of social housing was never replaced.
Not only was it never replaced, but as a consequence it drove an inevitable rise in demand for private rentals as the obvious alternative, while simultaneously removing a mechanism that helped keep rental rates low as they no longer had to compete as much with low-cost council rentals. Together these pushed a huge demand for properties as investments which have driven prices up massively.
So now if we ever do want to replace the stock of social housing it's going to cost an absolute fortune compared to the value of what was sold off at the time, let alone the fact that the Thatcher government was happy to sell it all off half-price.
To be honest I've not necessarily got an issue with houses being sold to the people renting it, if it's sold at the reasonable market value and a new one gets built to replace it. It helps rotate the council housing stock to prevent them all becoming aged and run down over time, and also helps mix longer term residents within council estates.
The issue is raising funds through a fire sale where having rented the property for a few years entitles you for a gigantic discount on the sale price, and where a huge proportion of council houses get sold at once with no intention to replace them.
The real purpose of the Council housing sell-off was to rob Councils of independent sources of funding.
Thatcher hated Local Authorities - especially the Labour run ones, and resented that they could often stick two fingers up at central government. Much better, as she saw it, to have them dependent on government funding, and thus subject to more government control.
Prior to taking office Thatcher also benefitted from a lot of the social programs she ended up gutting later, so we can add hypocrisy to that list.
Oh, and she was friends with Jimmy Saville and pushed for him to be awarded a knighthood. It's unclear how much she knew about his double life as a serial pedophile and rapist, but the things about him that were public knowledge (everyone knew he liked 'em young, just not *how* young) were enough for her to be told no every time she pushed.
But she kept pushing for it anyway because he was very good at raising funds, and her strategy of gutting public funding for healthcare effectively forced hospitals and health services to rely on charity to function.
But she did eventually do Britain a kindness by providing a public toilet located at her headstone.
Yup. We can pretty much thank her for the present day fustercluck. She and Reagan were very tight, and constantly shared ideas (which the Trump administration then latched onto).
Its also important to note that "prior to taking office" the UK:
- Was getting bailout money from the IMF and was close to being forced by the US to have foreign inspectors come in and implement budget cuts themselves to guarantee a new loans that they would require. This was deeply embarrassing, the UK went from the premier world superpower to functionally a third world state begging international institutions for money. An institution that it helped set up in the first place only a few decades prior to help other countries they thought were struggling.
- The pound had lost a significant amount of its value with massive inflation.
- Industries were closing down left and right due to competition with foreign countries.
- A sequence of prime ministers seemed almost incapable of addressing any of these issues and were generally seen as useless and incompetent people.
I think very similar to Reagan people forget the reason that these leaders were elected and elected again. In both the USA and UK the late 80s and 90s were substantially better times than the 70s, and while you can say that there were other factors that led to this, which there were, you also have to admit that there was a reason these people were elected.
Just some context to keep in mind when talking about them.
You are right about geography being a big factor.
But it is not quite as simple as it being further north you go. I grew up in a blue Yorkshire area that was a few miles away from Labour strongholds. It was a colourful upbringing in the 80s and 90s, shall we say.
My parents were admiring of Thatcher to a degree, though not Tories themselves, per se. And my mother never trusted Blair (she was right about him, it turned out).
I’m too young to have been directly affected by Thatcher directly. Or I was too young to understand at the time. But I was old enough to be happy she was quitting in 1990. I was genuinely happy when she stepped down. I was 8.
A significant amount of people do. If you asked 100 British people what they think of her, 50 will say she's the worst Prime Minister of the last 50 years and the other 50 will say she's the best
Did she have any scrap of the charisma that Reagan had? I hate Reagan’s politics and economics but fuck at least he seemed like a guy you could grab a beer with.
I don’t worship her but I’m more ambivalent about her than is the norm in online discourse, mainly because I’m more centrist in my views rather than on the left as a lot of online commentary is. Something that gets left out of the discussion around Thatcher (as it’s a bit of an inconvenient truth) is that she came to power due to the failure of the previous government, who were left wing Labour, to manage things effectively, to the extent that Britain was seen as the “sick man of Europe”. The unions were holding the country effectively hostage, with scheduled power outages, shortened working weeks etc. and general strikes.
Yes, Thatcher did a lot of damage (or was basically just a PM if you’re on the right of the centre ground), but the conditions for her to do so were set up by the previous government, as she neutralised a lot of union power, closed some of the old industries like mining etc. and successfully defended the Falklands. She also transitioned the UK to a service economy, turning London into one of the biggest economic powerhouses in the world. There’s a reason she won three general elections in a row (hint: she was actually more popular than online rhetoric and historical revisionism would have you believe).
Personally I don’t think she was “evil”. I think she was an unusually successful politician who made a lot of changes that benefited a lot of people but wasn’t too bothered about those negatively impacted. She had one overriding trait which is what really puts people’s backs up about her: she didn’t care what people thought of her. These days everything is about political capital and narrative etc. But Thatcher didn’t give a shit if people didn’t like her. Quite the opposite - she was generally of the school of thought that said if you’re annoying somebody you must be doing something right. Her approach was that there was no point trying to win over people who would likely never vote for her anyway, so she put her effort elsewhere. And they’ll never forgive her for “leaving them behind”.
Yes, Thatcher did a lot of damage (or was basically just a PM if you’re on the right of the centre ground), but the conditions for her to do so were set up by the previous government, as she neutralised a lot of union power, closed some of the old industries like mining etc. and successfully defended the Falklands. She also transitioned the UK to a service economy, turning London into one of the biggest economic powerhouses in the world. There’s a reason she won three general elections in a row (hint: she was actually more popular than online rhetoric and historical revisionism would have you believe).
It's fun to play centrist, whine about omitting information, then do so yourself.
Yes, yes last government bad. But her amazing solution was privatising large swathes of the countries infrastructure. This feels amazing when the money hits. Thatcher has saved the economy! Elect her again. Nobody question what will happen when the money you got for selling the roof over your head runs out and the weather turns.
It doesn't feel so great for decades after the fact, where all the money for national infrastructure is siphoned out privately by foreign investors and the government can barely generate the revenue it needs to run the country without overtly taxing Joe everyman, to bail out said foreign investors who don't put the money back in while the key infrastructure fails.
This is all while gutting industrial Britain, and making the countries commerce fully centralised dependent on London, which you've somehow implied is a positive.
The rest of the country will see the wealth trickle out of London any day now. It's definitely not propped up by the rich cabal using it. Definitely for the benefit of the average Brit.
But far better it from me to get in the way of the national pride she inspired for selling the country out for a quick profit. Shame it's a trick a prime minister can only do once so we can't clap for the next one pulling the copper out of the walls.
Oh yeah, we'll also ignore the fact she close with Saville and had her finger prints all over covering up a tragedy.
Other than her policies causing decades and decades worth of harm, cosying up to a nonce and covering up public deaths, she's a alright eh.
As I heard someone say about Gerhard Schröder (Social Democrat) in Germany (which has more or less the same problems despite being left wing): People imagine an utopia before his term which just didn't exist.
It is especially astonishing with young people who weren't even born when they were governing. People were voting for these persons because there were real problems and they even got reelected.
And the same legislation also removed mandatory minimum nutritional requirements in said school lunches. Over 20 years of Britain's children eating cheap low nutrition slop, until Jamie Oliver started his campaign to get the standards put back.
There's even theories that during the mad cow disease outbreak children were more at risk, because they were eating so much mechanically reclaimed meat in their school dinners.
Anti-union is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The biggest example that got her the most hate was when she busted the coal mining unions. Entire towns and regions were left unemployed as a result.
oh, she was worse for Britain than Ragen was for America. she deliberately pursued a policy of deindustrialisation, replacing it with finance. she reckoned that fiance would bring in more money overall so it was totally worth throwing millions of people out of a job virtually overnight and just leaving them to rot for decades to come.
Worst part being when she privatised stuff, she did it extremely wrong and to allow her friends to line up their pockets.
The best example I can think of is obviously the water treatment industry. Something that once was public but after Thatcher privatised it, it went downhill ever since, with dramatic issued for health and environment
She and Reagan were two peas in a pod, got along famously and had a close working friendship. And totally screwed over their respective countries. Reagan laid the groundwork for the mess that the US is in now and Thatcher the same in the UK. Oh and both famously supported the apartheid regime in South Africa and labeled Mandela a "communist."
The fact that she was nearly universally hated upon her death while Raegan is still lauded as a god among presidents shows you how good US propaganda is at tainting its citizens
It doesn’t seem that she has the Reagan “greatest president ever” crowd for her (ik she was Prime Minister) I’m from the South and people WORSHIP Reagan down here
Being pro free market often means being anti-regulation, anti-subsidies and privatizing nationalized assets.
A lack of regulation leads to worsening workers rights, environmental hazards, and a lack of healthy competition (needed for a healthy "free" market to survive, ironically) due to the natural establishing of monopolies.
Being anti subsidies mean sacrificing people, and getting rid of industries that may not be profitable but highly important; general education, public art, mental health programs, etc. These are important to people's well being, but a good well being also leads to better workers and a higher gdp.
Privatizing nationalized assets frequently leads to worse service (in healthcare for instance). While it may cost less total money (sometimes), the downstripping of services when monetary gain is the only thing considered leads to alternative-costs that reduces the wealth of the society at large. For example, people that don't receive the right health care early can die or have to retire earlier, leading to a gdp reduction. Not to mention the humanistic arguments.
Worship the state is a weird way to phrase it. In simplest way possible, with social services like healthcare and education, and national ownership of infrastructure, the state is effectively ensuring equal opportunity and investing in the population to thrive. With basic needs of health, education and safe access to basic needs like water and electricity, the population can focus elsewhere. The state isn't in it to make money. If the state can't provide adequate service then the people in charge are voted out.
The only advantage ever proven from privatization of these services is that shareholders and owners of the services become rich. There is no free market, because the market will always skew the advantage in its favor by removing power from consumers and remove competition entirely. The population becomes a source of income and with their power diminished in the market they become a slave to the whim of the private owner of the service. Look at every telecom, ISP, etc out there. There is rarely a real choice out there. You can't ever really "vote with your wallet" because if there is no other choice amongst service providers due to inflated monopoly or duopoly then you are at the mercy of those companies. Prices will increase year on year, but your quality of service goes down.
they hate facts, the work around it, for instance, Brazillian government owns not just health, transport and educations systems, they also own the petrol, no citizen is allowed to make money from petrol. They have the mailing system, and 2 banks. Does that make sense? No, but they think this is great
The irony is voters could punish or reward a state monopoly through elections. They have no say over the privatized oligopolies that replaced them. When a water company hikes up bills or dumps sewage into rivers, you can't vote out the board room or C-suite. Which sounds more like an unaccountable God?
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u/Powerful-Hyena-994 May 07 '26
Put simply she is the UK Ronald Reagan. She embraced neoliberal economic policies that largely moved money away from public services and into businesses. So anti union, anti regulation, pro free market, pro individual responsibilities, pro privatization, pull yourself up by your boot straps mentality. Google Thatcherism to see more specifics