How Britain changed under Margaret Thatcher. In 15 charts

What kind of Britain did Margaret Thatcher leave behind?
Population | Families | Unemployment | The economy | The pay gap| Public spending | House prices and interest rates | The unions |Poverty and inequality

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How did Britain change under Margaret Thatcher? Photograph: Graham Whitby-Boot/Allstar/Sportsphoto/Allstar

What is the the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who died today?

The 1980s is increasingly being seen as deep history - 50% of the Datablog team were born in the late 1980s and were just toddling into school when she resigned in November 1990.

If the past is a foreign country (they do things differently there), there is nowhere more foreign than May 1979, when the Conservatives entered Downing Street. In fact, it's getting increasingly difficult to tell - many of the datasets we rely on now weren't compiled until the early 1990s. So what kind of Britain did the country's first woman prime minister come to rule in 1979 - and how has it changed?

These are some of the datasets which actually go back that far - mostly from the Office for National Statistics, and some from the excellent British Political Facts.

She may or may not have caused it, but Britain under Thatcher saw huge economic, demographic and cultural change. These are just some of the facts.

Population

The UK was a smaller country then - 56.2m people lived here, compared to 62.3m people in 2010. That had been pretty stagnant since 1970, actually going down for four years before 1979 as the economy faltered. During the first years of Thatcher's reign, fewer people came to live in the UK - acceptances for settlement went down from 69,670 in 1979 to 53,200 by the time she resigned in 1990. Since then, the economy has boomed and eastern European countries have joined the EU. In fact, for much of the decade there were more people leaving the UK than coming here. Now it is the reverse. Net migration now is at a record high.

The population has changed too. There are no accurate figures for the UK's ethnic breakdown before the 1991 census, so we can't say what Britain's ethnic mix was. By the 2001 census, four years after the end of the Conservatives in power, the UK's population was 92.1% white. According to the latest ONS estimates, that figure has gone down now as Britain becomes more diverse; 83.35% of England and Wales is now defined as "white British".

We're living longer - life expectancy overall went up from 70.3 for men and 76.4 for women in 1979 by three years for both sexes by 1990. In a developed country, life expectancy should go up as medicine improves and the economy grows. But in 1985 it went down briefly, as it did again in 1993, both after huge recessions.

There are more of the super-old around now. Some 15% of babies born in 1979 would live to reach 100 - that figure is 26% now.

Families

Ironically for a prime minister who focussed so much on family life, the 1980s saw the end of the traditional family unit for many. Divorce rates reached 13.4 per 1,000 married population in 1985, although that wasn't as high as the peak of 1994 after the recession. They have gone down now. The most recent figures show that 119,589 people got divorced in 2010, roughly half of the number of people who got married the same year.

Of course, fewer people are getting married now - only 231,490 in the latest year, down from 368,853 in 1979, which was the highest figure since the war brides of 1940.

Which also means less babies being born to a traditional family unit too - in 1979, only 12.5% of babies were born outside marriage. By 1991 that had gone up to 29.8%.

Unemployment

As Britain learnt to come to terms with the idea of "no such thing as society", unemployment shot up under the Conservatives to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The figures show how it lags behind the economy - even after the recession was over, many were unemployed.

The economy

Britain got hit by two major recessions under Thatcher, which sandwiched the boom of the 1980s but even that boom never saw GDP grow by more than a couple of percent. Obviously in 2013, George Osborne would kill for growth of 2.2%.

If the deficit is the obsession of this government, in 1979 it was inflation, which had rocketed into the twenties in the 1970s.