The disagreement is typically around whether the plan was really about necessary economic restructuring or just the latest assault in Britain's 1000 year-old class war.
The actions taken towards the communities she "restructured" since her premiership seem to show evidence in favor of the latter. If thatcher and the tories were really concerned with improving the country as a whole, they would have taken action on the long-term systemic problems with our workforce (education etc) and given the communities they destroyed something to do between then and now. Instead what they did was simply replace the industry with foreign financial wizardry, while leaving the workers to rot. 30 years later, they use the gap in achievement between these two groups as a stick with which to beat the poor even harder.
And that's the last I'm saying on this subject today.
Viewed from outside, it looks like Britain's gambit towards financial services was highly successful. True, Britain completely destroyed the industrial might it had in the first half of the XX century. It gained, in the process, European leadership in finance.
A number of questions arise, of course. Does finance employ the same people that worked in factory floors? No. Is finance sustainable in the long term? I doubt it, as it is much more mobile than manufacturing (Germany is attacking the British stronghold in finance). Would manufacturing decline anyway? Possibly; in the US it did, but in Germany it didn't. In the end, it is always a game of what-ifs.
Anyhow, I'm not in the position to have a sustained opinion on Thatcher's policies. I was way too young, and did not really study British history from the period. I have no idea if they were positive or negative overall.
She did have a plan, though. I wish current European leaders had one too, beyond "let's grab what we can while the Titanic is going down".
I'm not entirely convinced she did have a plan, to be honest. She had strong beliefs and wasn't afraid to follow her intuition when a large part of the country disagreed with her, but the popular appeal of policies like the "right-to-buy" were more or less a side-effect and her most controversial policy stance on disinflation was so comprehensively reversed under her second Chancellor Lawson that inflation (and interest rates) were approaching the same levels towards the end of her reign as it reached at the beginning. And of course the biggest boon to her political career was Argentina invading. Other policies like the Community Charge were an unmitigated disaster.
Overall, the big change with modern politicians isn't so much that she had a plan as her willingness to take radical actions that weren't part of the plan or some near-consensus view
It was not really like that. Britain was always big in financial services, that came from ships and Empire (insurance really). Plus then the US created the euro bond markets and oil created petrodollars. But it was an old boys club and very inefficient. Industry in the UK was already in a bad state and was going away already. As much accident as plan.
The actions taken towards the communities she "restructured" since her premiership seem to show evidence in favor of the latter. If thatcher and the tories were really concerned with improving the country as a whole, they would have taken action on the long-term systemic problems with our workforce (education etc) and given the communities they destroyed something to do between then and now. Instead what they did was simply replace the industry with foreign financial wizardry, while leaving the workers to rot. 30 years later, they use the gap in achievement between these two groups as a stick with which to beat the poor even harder.
And that's the last I'm saying on this subject today.