Thatcher Considered The Greatest Prime Minister Ever?

To be fair while it was not impossible on paper to save a lot of industrial sectors from going under and to make them world beaters again. The cost of such a policy would have been utterly massive and it would more importantly have required good decisions and great foresight on the part of politicians, managers, unions and decisions makers of all kind.

The investment required to make British Leyland an equivalent of Toyota would have been massive, requiring both capital investment in plants, compensating huge losses for the transition period and huge investments in R&D with the aim of making world beating car that everyone would want to buy.

The same story is true in many other industrial sectors like steel, shipbuilding, aerospace and so on.

Certainly if Thatcher had a better grasp of industrial realities (a reproach made by the ICI chairman of the time), things would have been better and instead of the "cutting the dead wood" of OTL we could have had an industrial policy aimed at developping new industries instead.

This is the reason why as a conservative I think that Thatcher is way overrated by both her supporters and opponents. The woman was clearly not a genius at all and never really came up with out of the box solutions and policies on her own. While I grant that she had a good grasp of basic economics. The reality is that real world economics and industrial economics are far more complicated that running a grocery store or an home budget.

A lot of her premiership was rethoric and style over real substance and policies. The best example of this is with regards to defence, yes the Lady won the Falklands war, but she also presided over numerous defence cuts and rundown of the national defence industry whose consequences are still felt today.

And don't get me started on the "Thatcher and Reagan won the Cold War". They were damm lucky to have Gorby in power at the time and the SU was on its last legs anyways. Some of the rethoric may have helped I grant.
 
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