Reaganist/Thatcherist/neoliberalist policies are bad for countries

Thatcher: why her policies have ruined Britain Thatcher had many policies, but of the the many, I will discuss the main problems, focusing on the economy and taxation, industrial relations, deregulation and privatisation Economy and taxation She was groomed by Chicago school economists like Milton Friedman, and took inspiration from writings of the Austrian School of Economics like Hayek"s "The Road to Serfdom". This meant she felt the extreme need to employ monetary policy. She cut direct taxes while raising indirect taxes, and raised interest rates to slow money supply growth. While all this cut inflation to 4% by 1983 from 18.6% in 1981, it closed factories, resulting in unemployment of 3 million (12.5% of Britain"s population at the time) across the UK, the worst in 40 years. Northern Ireland, a region already plagued by civil war saw unemployment reach 20%, while Scotland and Northern England saw unemployment reach 15%. By April 1983 Britain became a net importer of goods for the first time; a sad decline from the title of "Workshop of the World". People who had bought their homes due to the "right to buy" schemes saw their house repossessed, as mortgage payments spiralled upwards. Alongside this in 1981, due to racial tensions with immigrants in inner cities, race riots broke out in inner city areas. The racial tensions culminated in the riots due to the Conservative introduced "sus-law" of 1979, allowing police to stop and search suspicious people. A young black man who had been stabbed in Brixton, London, was reported to have been stopped and questioned under "sus-law" by police rather than helped. The sus-law was effectively an opportunity for institutional racism. It was only when the law was repealed in 1981 was law and order fully restored. Privatisation and deregulation After 1983 Thatcher began selling state utilities, raising more than "29 billion from privatised industries and "18 billion from the sale of council housing. Stock exchange controls were abolished in 1979, and other forms of financial deregulation were introduced on the finance sector. She heavily promoted the free market, and moved the economy onto a service base. As a result 80% of the UK"s labour force works in services. And all of this was in the name of her individualist point of view: "there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." According to Neil Harding, a writer on Politics.co.uk, "Surveys have long suggested the 70s were the happiest times in Britain", which he attributes to the strong sense of communities, because as we know in 1970 employment was rising in Britain. Thatcher destroyed this social identity when she began instating her ideals of neoliberalism (which we know do not work for countries). By smashing manufacturing in the North, poverty increased drastically; in fact when football fans travelled to away games in London they would be taunted by home supporters waving wads of "10 notes. Industrial relations Thatcher greatly reduced the power of the unions, like Reagan, by making it harder to take strike action. True, the unions had caused the Winter of Discontent, in which public sector trade unions took strike action over James Callaghan"s attempts to control cost-push inflation caused by rising oil prices, by capping wage growth at 5%. She smashed Trade Unions legislation that she "managed to destroy the power of trade unions for almost a generation". In the Miners" Strike of 1984, Nationalised coal industry miners" went on strike as the government insisted cutting jobs and mechanising the industries. Out of the 174 operating coal mines, more than 20 were shut and over 20,000 jobs lost. In fact, the "de-industrial revolution" began under Thatcher, and the only people that could have stopped her were made powerless. All of this comes under Thatcher"s individualist, Neoliberalist ideals of government; she didn"t do what was in the best interests of all citizens; improving their quality of life and standard of living. She paved the way for a state in which corporations will only pay 12.5% corporation tax by 2021. T Thanks to Thatcher, the decline of manufacturing jobs accelerated, and Britain is a shadow of itself. A country that used to be "The Work-Shop of the World" is now nothing more than a set of banks and a housing crisis. We have a trade deficit almost reaching 100 billion, thanks to Thatcher, and while she did some things right, and was a conviction politician (hence the nickname "The Iron Lady"), something lacking in today"s British Politics, her introduction of Neoliberalism has left Britain as the state it is now. The Gini Index in the UK stands at 32.2 according to the World Bank.