The Thatcher era, three decades on

Hard to believe that it was 30 years ago today that the British electorate voted Margaret Thatcher in as the nation's first woman prime minister.
What a catastrophe she was, for the economy, for society, for Britain as a whole.
* Inflation doubled within a year and remained at an average of 8% throughout her “reign”.
* Indirect taxes (which disproportionately affect those on lower incomes) nearly doubled, VAT rose from 8% to 15%.
* Interest rates shot up, to more than 17%.
* Unemployment rocketed from 1.4m in 1979 to 3.5m by 1982, or one in eight people out of work, higher than anytime since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
* Long-term unemployment blighted an entire generation in Northern Ireland, Scotland, South Wales, the North East, and the North West, and of course huge swathes of Yorkshire.
* Industry declined in the North and the Midlands (remember coal, steel, ship-building); although there were new sectors like financial services in the South.

What prosperity Mrs Thatcher brought was selective and temporary.
She left Britain in recession, with unemployment, inflation, and interest rates rising.

Mrs Thatcher said there was “no such thing as society”, and made the perverse observation that the only reason the Good Samaritan did any good was “because he had money”.

Above all, not only was she bad for Britain when she was PM, she continues to be bad for the country today. The causes of the present slump, unrestricted credit, deregulation, and too much financial speculation, all date back to the 1980s. No successive government dared reverse these decisions: a curse we all now share.

To paraphrase Auden's description of the 1930s, Mrs Thatcher's time in office was a, "low, dishonest decade."