Either way you look at it, more Thatcherism can't fix our economy.

Some people will insist on believing that the last Labour government are to blame for the UK's current economic climate. It's no wonder: the Tories and most of the media claim this too. Let's look at the conditions that created economic collapse.

What happened

• Thatcher's Tories were responsible for deregulation of the UK financial industry. 
• This was very popular with wealthy and influential businesses, lobbyists, much of the media and right-wing and centrist politicians and was successful in bringing a great deal of wealth to the capital (albeit mostly in just a few hands).
• New Labour continued financial deregulation in the late 90s and early 2000s.
• They had to. It was seen as the driving force behind the boom in the City of London which is still considered to be (although figures don't actually support this: the service industries and manufacturing are both larger) the basis of the entire UK economy. And even if they wanted to re-regulate the industry, the power and influence behind big trading would have proven too much.
• The Tories, in opposition, approved of Labour's continuation of financial deregulation but also said further regulation was necessary.
• Deregulation allowed very risky and highly dubious practices to go unchecked and after a period of unbridled success, the pressure of unstable international markets (notably the US which was using the UK system for its own dodgy practices) brought it all crashing down.

So the Tories began and championed deregulation of the financial markets that caused the crash and meant that the government had to bail out the banks, spending around £1.5 trillion pounds doing so. Had the Tories been in power, this still would have happened and they would have also bailed out the banks and the UK's budget deficit would be in the same position it is now (in 2007/8 before the crash, the Tories promised to match Labour's public spending plans).

A much more simple argument

If you still can't accept that the above facts mean the crash would still have happened if the Tories were in power then how about this:

Margaret Thatcher herself said that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour. "We forced our opponents to change their minds." New Labour continued Thatcherism and virtually all of its free-market policies. This being the case, how is what New Labour did any different to what the Tories would have done?

And more urgently: if New Labour's Thatcherite economic policies did nothing to prevent the crash, how would yet more Thatcherism from the current Tories ever be able to fix the problem?!