"To her supporters...Margaret Thatcher left Britain a renewed and invigorated force both at home and on the world stage. She reversed years of national decline. She made Britain again the essential ally of the United States, largely due to her personal relationship with President Reagan, and helped end the Cold War. She turned around the economy and finally tamed the over-powerful unions, who had protected their own interests at the expense of the country's well-being for far too long. She radically overhauled the British state, taking power away from bureaucrats and putting it in the hands of the electorate, who came to enjoy a wealth and a standard of living that they had never known before. On coming to power she found Britain in tatters, and she gave it back its pride and confidence. Her critics, however, are less kind. They point above all to her intensely divisive nature and question the efficacy of many of her policies. The "economic miracle" is largely a myth, they insist, suggesting that recovery was inevitable and that monetarism only prolonged the recession of the early 1980s. Even when recovery came it proved unsustainable and was over-egged by Lawson with her acquiescence, which then led to the harsh recession of the 1990s. While a few became rich under Mrs Thatcher, many missed out on growing prosperity, and the gap between the rich and the poor, and north and south, widened considerably."