"She deregulated financial institutions so that they could rip us all off when the going was good and make us bale out the bastards out when things, inevitably, went pear-shaped."

I've got news for you Steve, that is not "Thatcher's revenge", that is how the capitalist system works. Any tinkering with it causes stagnation. It is cyclical in nature and investment goes where the biggest profits are to be made.
Britain simply could not compete globally due to lack of investment on new plant and production methods, but chiefly because of the mad wasteful standard of living which we had come to expect.
This unrealistic attitude to lifestyle has continued into the twenty first century and has produced a society which contains the very rich, the very "comfortable", and a huge underclass who are largely ignored and left to fester in a situation where work is unavailable through lack of proper training and the development of a work ethic.
Amongst this underclass, there are huge drug problems which our health services seem unable or unwilling to address, social problems regarding criminality are so common as to be considered normal.

Granting marriage "rights" to homosexuals, or expensive operations and all the follow up after care involved to to psychiatric cases who believe themselves to be of a different gender will make not a jot of difference to the real problems of society.....in fact , this media inspire concentration on "rights" issues compounds the problem.