This is certainly the standard story.

It's not at all clear to me that it was Thatcher's amazing economic policies that turned the economy around rather than the boom years of North Sea oil.

Even if Thatcher's policies did stimulate the economy at the time, from where we're sitting now, what is clear is that that stimulus was not sustainable, and that all that privatisation and the Big Bang did was borrow from the future to splash the cash in the then-present.