Earlier quoted context omitted.
UK before Tatcher was a depressed society with stagflation, rising crimes, crumbling infrastructure; that couldn't even clean its own streets. It was a society completely hamstrung by old unions that would happily collapse the economy in face of global competition, as long as their jobs gave the same pay - nominally. Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason.
Honestly, I'm not an economist, even worse I was not a fully functioning and critical thinking adult before the Thatcher era, you could well be right but I find it really hard to believe. For example the UK has also had subsequent Conservative victories for the last 12 years or so but every single argument made in 2010 about their approach has been proven true. To the detriment of every person in the UK. So it doesn'…
There certainly was an aspect of that back in the 80s. In the early years Labour was lead by Michael Foot, basically a likeable version of Corbyn but just as unelectable. But then, the Labour Party back then was properly Marxist and had actually pushed forward a programme of nationalisation and unionisation that worked out about as well as you'd expect.
The most egregious example of waste was the coal industry, hence the strikes. The tax payer was subsidizing coal to the tune of £1.3 billion a year which was real money back then, just under 1% of total national GDP, not including the increased costs to power and steel industries that were prevented from using cheaper alternatives. When the mining union leader Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.” That's what we were dealing with. That's just coal, but swathes of industry had been nationalised and was a horrible rotting carcass of waste and losses dragging the country down. Reforming that lot was incredibly painful but it had to be done.
Maggie is generally portrayed as being incredibly unpopular, and the way she was lampooned by a generation of up coming British comics was cruel though frankly hilarious, but she won resounding election victory after victory. The economy she built transformed the country into the modern nation it is today. Notably when Blair and Brown brought in a Labour government in 1997 they changed essentially nothing substantive because her reforms palpably worked. All the proposed changes reverting Britain towards a statist socialist economic agenda were quietly shelved and never talked about agin until Corbyn came along.
Since then Conservatism on both sides of the pond has suffered an appalling moral and intellectual collapse. The conservative and republican parties are mocking parodies of their former selves. Back in the 80s there were serious, major economic and social problems that desperately needed fixing and economic liberalism had the answers. Nowadays that's just not even vaguely controversial, instead the focus of the right has shifted towards damaging reactionary dog whistle issues like culture wars and blind nationalism. That tendency has always been there, but now it's all they have.