If you argue that Thatcher killed manufacturing in Britain, you sort of forget that manufacturing were dying all over western Europe at the time. Sure Thatcher's policies might have sped up the process in the UK, but it still happened in most western countries at the time. And speeding it up might actually have been a rather good thing as the white-collar based economy of modern western Europe was created in Britain much faster than in say Sweden or France.
There's no doubt at all that the Thatcher government's policies sped up (and so made infinitely more traumatic) deindustrialisation; the number of manufacturing jobs lost in the first couple of years of her regime - and this is something that can be tied directly to certain policy shifts insisted on for various reasons - is really quite staggering. Though in some (no, wait,
all) respects the really awful thing was that no effort was made to lessen the blow; the same was true (of course) with regards to the deliberate destruction of the coal industry a little later. Especially ghastly is the fact that some of the places hit hardest had already experienced deindustrialisation in the 1960s (specifically the older coalfields, where light manufacturing had sort-of-mostly-kind-of replaced the pits; and also inner city manufacturing districts in cities like Birmingham). The longterm consequences have been catastrophic.
Obviously a lot of people did very well out of the boom in financial services (and all things that linked into that) that followed deregulation (let's ignore the issue of whether that was really such a clever idea for the time being), but these people tended not to live in the places that had seen their local economies crash and burn at the start of the decade.
Thus bitterness.
