Thatcher was, along with Nelson Mandela, one of the two greatest heads of government in the 20th century. Obviously a substantial number of people hate her, including most people on this board, but Great Britain was a borderline failed state when she entered office. There were restrictions on how much money could be taken out of the country, unions could shut down society basically whenever they wanted, people were living in terrible state-owned housing, and the list goes on. Lady Thatcher realized that in order to save the country, she had to make a lot of people angry, especially the union leaders who had a completely unreasonable amount of influence.
She, almost single-handedly, transformed a failing welfare state that people with opportunity were fleeing from into a stable economic country, such that even her opposition eventually had to adopt many of her policies. To this date, she is the only modern Western political leader to revitalize a genuinely broken country's political systems and give it a sustainable budget, even without being fortunate enough to have a massive tech boom create a giant surplus by accident.
So yes, a lot of people were made worse off in the short term by what she did; that was because they should never have been given those things in the first place, because the long-term sustainability was never there. The only comfort in her death is that I can't see such a vibrant and intelligent lady wanting to spend any more time crippled with dementia.
