Former coal-mining communities

This poses something of a dichotomy, HN. Yes, life down the pits was bloody hard and fraught with danger, but it was a way of life for whole communities, a good and sustaining way of life with proud men able to put food on the table for their families.
Thatcher didn’t set about destroying the long-held traditions and practices for the good of anyone’s health – christ – she decimated the entire mining industry in her determination to bring down the Unions and to show who could pi.ss highest up the wall.
I was one of the many, active at the time in supporting the CP in their struggle against that murderous whore and everything she stood for. We held numerous benefits to raise funds for the miners and picketed the scabs like Yuill and Dodds, and slapped bandages on bloody heads, broken on the end of police truncheons..
..Finally, we wept like babies at the passing of an age.
The Thatcher apologists amongst you, will forgive the thousands like myself – who – when the final clods of earth are shovelled onto her coffin, will line up to dance a merry jig on her grave.

Margaret Thatcher had an ally in the destruction of our coal industry, remember…..
called Arthur Scargill. He certainly won’t get a state funeral, except perhaps in North Korea.

Arthur Scargill was right every word it was his style that was wrong We shouldnt have gone on strike then and we certainly shouldnt have gone back

More police than pickets she wanted the strike she’d planned for it Scargill didnt actually want it then

Hmmm…one mans poison is another mans.. etc

Taken from a child of the 70’s who remembers my proud working class parents despair at the dead lying unburied, rubbish filling our streets, power cuts, wild cat strikes etc etc etc and finding someone who was prepared to stand up to a bullying left wing socialist agenda which held an entire country to ransom, I think she did a job she set out to do and did it very well- she turned Britain into a country worth investing in.

This country was brought kicking and screaming into the 20th century during the 80’s and it didnt like it one bit (nor does it now)

I do not deny the devastation the mining communities of South Wales, South Yorkshire, North Notts etc suffered, the shipbuilders of the Clyde, The Tyne and the Mersey, etc etc

But as the cotton industry collpased 100 years ago- not all the evil in the world is the fault of one person

She was a very divisive PM who did indeed divide families but ironically she was the instigator of the breakdown of the class system- without Thatcher, you wouldnt have had Blair- vast swathes of socially engineered brain washed communities suddenly started thinking for themselves instead of voting how their father, gradfather, greatgrandfather etc had

State funeral? Probably not but she was the right person, at the right time in the right job
IMO