For all the present system's undoubted flaws......

The May edition of Standpoint magazine features a piece by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson on the creed of his former leader.

Lawosn argues that the notion of Thatchersism

can probably best be described as a constellation of values and beliefs, a mixture of the rule of law, sound money, free markets, financial discipline, firm control of public spending, lower tax rates, patriotism or nationalism (the distinction is largely in the eye of the beholder), Victorian values (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism.

His essay reads as an adulation of at least the first two terms but he defends the 1986 Financial services act which is blamed for the situation that we now find ourselves in.

however flawed it may have proved to be (although the greatest failure has been the way in which it has been implemented under the present government), was an act of regulation, not deregulation. It replaced a patchy and informal system which had been rendered obsolete by the rapid development of the financial services industry in an era of increasing globalisation and the internationalisation of the City of London (to the great benefit of the British economy) following the so-called "Big Bang" reforms of the London stock exchange.

and adds that

for all the present system's undoubted flaws, every other method of economic organisation has proved to be infinitely worse.