Liz Truss has styled herself the twenty-first century’s answer to Margaret Thatcher. In part, this was a shallow attempt to win over Tory members, most of whom are old and rich enough to have benefitted substantially from Thatcherism. But what would it mean for the UK were we to take Truss at her word?

Perhaps the most memorable part of Thatcher’s legacy was her all-out war on the UK labour movement. Thatcher used the full power of the British state to decimate striking coal miners and all those who attempted to stand in solidarity with them.

Once the miners were defeated, the labour movement fell into secular decline—not arrested by any of the Labour governments that followed. The injustices perpetuated by the British police at strikes such as Orgreave have still not been recognised by those responsible.

On this front, Truss is likely to follow in the footsteps of her heroine. She’s already announced plans to increase required pre-strike notice periods, raise the threshold for approving strike action, and limit essential public service workers’ ability to strike.

Then there are taxes. Thatcher introduced successive cuts to income tax, the top rate of which stood at a whopping 83 percent before 1979. The top rate was reduced sharply, and the basic rate only slightly, with a regressive effect.

But as an ardent monetarist, Thatcher also raised other taxes—most famously, the poll tax, which ultimately led to her demise. In a highly regressive move, she also hiked up VAT to 15 percent.

In sum, Thatcher’s tax policy was very much focused on raising taxes on working-class households while providing tax cuts for the wealthy. As we know, this led to a sharp increase in inequality, which rose by eight points on the GINI scale between 1979 and 1990.

When it comes to public spending, there is a widespread myth that Thatcher was one of the earliest architects of austerity. In fact, Thatcher didn’t introduce many drastic cuts to spending. As George Eaton has pointed out here, nominal rates of public spending actually rose by an average of 1.1 percent per year under her governments.

Public spending as a percentage of GDP did fall, but only when growth shot up towards the end of the 1980s. This drastic increase in GDP was, of course, the result of the beginnings of a massive bubble in financial and housing markets that gave us a precursor to the financial crisis of 2008 in the housing crash of the early 1990s.

So if Truss really is a Thatcherite, we can expect deep tax cuts for the rich, potentially alongside highly regressive tax increases for everyone else, and relative stability in terms of nominal spending.

These policies will, of course, have a completely different impact on the British economy today than they did in the 1980s. First and foremost, while remaining largely stable since the financial crisis, inequality has started to rise once again in the last few years (when you measure it properly).

If Truss attempts to use the tax system to undertake upwards redistribution on the same scale as Thatcher—giving us another eight-point increase in our GINI coefficient—the UK would end up roughly as unequal as countries like Mexico and Chile. Such levels of inequality are likely to elicit a strong counter-reaction, as in the latter, or lead to deep and pervasive violence and social breakdown, as in the former.

And Truss won’t be able to rely on growth to reduce the ratio of public spending to GDP. The UK is headed for a long and deep recession, underlain by a long-term stagnation in productivity that successive governments have yet to reckon with.

She definitely won’t be able to rely on another financial and housing boom of the kind that facilitated the increases in GDP seen under Thatcher. Levels of debt and asset prices are too high to allow for another boom, not to mention the fact that bank regulation has changed significantly since the pre-crisis period.

The UK’s future looks more like post-crash Japan than pre-boom London. And as Shinzo Abe could attest, managing the macroeconomy in the context of secularly low productivity and investment is a delicate balancing act.

What’s more, before the Bank of England’s independence, Thatcher was able to manipulate interest rates to achieve her desired outcomes. Loose monetary policy was partially responsible for the housing and financial boom of the late 1980s. Truss is likely to face an increasingly tight monetary environment if Bank of England forecasters are to be believed.

And what of Thatcher’s ‘supply-side’ reforms, privatisation and deregulation? When it comes to privatisation, the British state has already been stripped to the bone. Publicly owned corporations have been replaced by unaccountable corporate giants and outsourcing companies currently dumping raw sewage in our waterways and profiteering from the energy crisis. Support for public ownership has never been higher.

Truss can—and probably will—try to deregulate. But ‘cutting red tape’ has never done much to boost productivity. Thatcher’s reforms, which unleashed the power of the City of London and ultimately leading to the financial crisis, are the exception that proves the rule.

As is now well known, Thatcherism was never about ‘shrinking the state’ or ‘rewarding wealth creators’. It was about shifting wealth and power in society away from organised workers and towards wealthy executives and rentier interests in finance and real estate.

That might have worked in the 1980s, but today the power of the working class is only just beginning to recover from a modern historical nadir. Meanwhile, the wealthy are running out of ways artificially to prop up asset prices to boost economic growth and are therefore instead seeking to take an ever-greater share of a shrinking pie.

If Trussonomics really is faithful to its alleged Thatcherite roots, we’ll see significant amounts of upward redistribution, but in a shrinking and sclerotic economy that simply cannot bear the weight of more extractive profiteering.