A couple of the answers above show the selective memory of right wing supporters..
Thatcher de regulated Banking and foreign ownership of Banks and allowed the influx of the casino Banks into Britain remember "The Big Bang" bringing the massive bonus culture and risk taking which eventually brought about the financial collapse.
On the sale of council housing stock, most were sold at a song 65% discounts, then bought up when the people found they could not afford the upkeep, she also prevented, by law, the councils from using the money raised to build new housing stock, the councils were encouraged to invest the money raised by the sales, most of them did this and lost out when the Icelandic Banks went down the pan.
Her house selling plan was, like the share sales in the Utilities an attempt to manufacture millions of mini Tories, but she forgot to tell the people that they would not get tenfold of their investment instantly but would have a very small income from the shares, because of these sales, the share prices were depressed and again her wealthy friends and sponsors snapped up millions of them...
Through her "Reign" the gap between rich and poor increased by a factor of three...
Camoron is the spawn of Thatcher.
'a cheap mortgage scheme'
You may have noticed something strange happening to the economy of the Western World around about 2007 - 2008. A certain Chancellor and his boss have said that we were about four hours away from total collapse of the financial system at one point, with the ATM's about to be locked shut.
I wonder what could have contributed to that sort of mess which (in case you hadn't noticed) we are still paying for and will be paying for for decades.
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@Jack H - I must remember to sell you an investment plan some time... The Global Financial Crash of 2007-2008, was specifically caused by a bubble in property prices, notably those bought with what are termed sub-prime mortgage properties, that is those which were purchased with mortgages that should never have been sold in the first place. I do not think Margaret Thatcher can be blamed for the derivatives market which American banks built on these financial instruments, nor for the way in which the derivatives market subsequently failed.
On the other hand you may know a slogan or two which express different theories.
Not Thatchers to sell and Thatcher did not sell them. They were sold by the local Councils to sitting tenants who would otherwise have been in them for life at rents well below the market rate.
The fact is that if you lived in a Council House it was not yours and you were very restricted in how you could improve it - with little incentive to do so if your neighbours house was a mess.
Council houses were a trap - they trapped their tenants into generational poverty having no capital base to pass on to help their children. Many Council tenants could afford to buy houses but did not want to give up the subsidised and maintained housing provided to them.
Council houses are the property of the Taxpayers, I'm all for selling them off but at market rate & not discounted.
She deliberately and cynically sold off the council housing stock to secure the vote of the lower classes. She gained millions of votes from tenants now able to buy their homes, and to this day many lower class Britons revere her for it. Of course, it meant that there were hardly any council houses left for the needy people of future generations....but that wasn't her problem.
So you'd rather Philpotts and the like live in them then,. with a few pitbulls...
the way people talk Thatcher devised home ownership but you could buy a House long before Thatcher was born.
she gave them away at well below the market value.
The fact is the Council houses on our estate have just been modernised and are fantastic while you have to pay yourself if you have bought your council house.
Omg when they first sold them off you knew who had bought their house because the put on a new front door to say look we own our house now.
Thatcher could have introduced a cheap mortgage scheme for people To Buy their home and had no right to sell off council houses.
Also they said at the time that if people owned something then they were less likely to cause trouble because they now had something to lose, and so it was not about owning your home.
Anyway this is a disgrace that the son of the minister who introduced the right to buy now owns 40 council houses.
