The eighties: a warning from history? Part 2

Apparently, another warning from history which everyone must heed is that all parties must seek to emulate the Conservative record of economic competence, because There Is No Alternative:

By then [1980], Thatcher's application of Friedmanite principles - restricting the money supply, cutting public spending - was indeed producing results. During her first year inflation surged from 9 per cent to more than 20 per cent; interest rates and unemployment both rose sharply; and Britain's manufacturing industry, the legacy of that energetic nineteenth-century entrepreneurialism  which Friedman and Thatcher so admired, was battered by recession.

From Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World