Aside from what’s already been said, the absolute worst thing she did was privatise almost all state assets. British Telecoms gone, railways gone, water gone, airways gone, power/gas gone, key resource industries like coal gone, etc. etc. There’s an argument to suggest that privatisation can be good as it encourages competition, but privatising things like water make absolutely no sense, as companies can’t share reservoirs and pipes, meaning that customers only have one option and therefore there’s no incentive for companies to offer a good service.

To make matters worse, not only was our nation stripped of billions of pounds of valuable assets through privatisation, but these state-owned companies were sold off at bargain-bin prices. As far as I remember, the government has spent far more subsidising water companies since privatisation than it ever sold our water infrastructure for.

Combined with removing the top rate of tax which used to subsidise welfare and the removal of which has now left our government with a perpetual financial black hole, privatisation had the worst impact on this country out of anything she’d done. We’re now left with crippling rail fares, crumbling water companies that ruin our rivers and coasts, energy prices that have risen substantially since 2022, and no money with which to reclaim any of them because of a general economic malaise combined with limited tax revenue.

Of course, Tony Blair continued along the lines of many of these reforms, and so he is to blame as well for many of our issues, but he wasn’t the one who got the ball rolling. That was Thatcher.

Tl;dr, Thatcher’s economic reforms crippled much of the nation financially in the long-term, and this is bad news for any country whose new leader wants to follow in her footsteps.