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Hard to say. ‘No, they couldn’t be reformed’ is certainly plausible. Things like Rover cars, the mines, and the factories had leveraged their ‘too big to fail’ / ‘we represent national prestige so it’ll look terrible if you let us fail’ for decades and the parasites had run their hosts into the ground.
Thatcher et al either lacked the appetite for a political purge or didn’t think they could pull it off, and chose to destroy or sell them instead. The idea was that whichever German conglomerate bought Jaguar wouldn’t care that it was a British prestige brand, only whether it was profitable or not. (And the current issues Jaguar is having makes the limit of that approach clear).
I wasn’t alive then and I have no idea whether Thatcher had a chance of destroying the unions without killing their hosts. I think it would have been worth trying. The alternative was just delaying decline.
Unfortunately Thatcher’s successors (Blair, Brown, Cameron) drank the Kool Aid along with the rest of the country (plus me to be fair) and started thinking that getting rid of everything except financial services and the ‘creative industries’ had been an inspired act of economic genius rather than an act of desperation.
Like many economists, they seemed to believe that deregulation caused or triggered growth rather than merely removing one set of obstacles to it. So we kept slashing and selling and we didn’t do anything useful with the money.
Scargill and the like had toppled a labour government: humiliating the PM at the time and dragging the country into a standstill. I would focus on Thatcher's predecessors (Callaghan, Wilson) as she was largely a reaction to their failed policy. If unions will sabotage the pro-Labor party, there's no point in government negotiating with them. By the time Thatcher came to be the public wanted the government to destroy the power of the unions and once that was accomplished they dispensed of her for more amiable neoliberal money-men: she was just the hatchet-man.
Granted. I just wonder if it would have been possible to destroy the unions without flogging the industries. Callaghan and Wilson certainly failed to come to an agreement with the unions but I don’t think they wanted to destroy them? They were Labour politicians.
Who is ‘they’? The public? Poll tax aside, she was still reasonably popular I think - she was unseated by internal party politics.
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Thatcher didn't want to save them, selling them off wasn't an act of desperation it was an act of political ideology.
"Margaret Thatcher strongly supported the initiative, as did the majority of her government, and considered it as a fundamental to improve the economic performance. “As she explained in her memoirs, [she] saw privatisation as ‘fundamental to improving Britain’s economic performance’. But it also chimed with her political ideology.”"
She believed that private industry with decreased regulation was the best way forward. She also wanted council houses and social housing in general out of public ownership and into private hands.
Indeed her famous "The lady's not for turning" speech was given because she was under significant pressure to stop her neoliberal policies. This wasn't desperation, this was exactly the culmination of her principles. Even if they had been performing well and the UK economy was doing well, she would have tried to do the same.
As for unions, she didn't kill them but she crippled them (or they crippled themselves depending on your opinion of Scargill et al). Trade union membership dropped nearly 10 percent during her tenure and days lost to strikes dropped 10 fold by the end of her final year. British Steel had returned to profitability by halving the workforce among other changes, but was still privatized/ This wasn't a fire sale, it was a strategy. And largely she was proven correct, most of the privatized companies showed improvements in performance and labor productivity, even those that were already running reasonably well.
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