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But like anything political there is the other side of the coin.

For many who simply wanted to continue their work as usual found themselves involved with the consequences of a dispute of miners. Ultimately people like to choose a side to blame for catastrophes such as the 3 day working week (due to power shortages because of the coal strike, electricity had to be rationed). How much hard did that do to other industries. My grandfather at the time an electrical engineer lost his job due rather directly to the 3 day week.

For people like them Thatcher was a good thing, ultimately it was not her fault that the unions did not want to compromise on closing mines. The reaction of unions towards a shift from being a publicly subsidised industry I don't think can be described in anyway as sustainable or even 'long term OK'.

I find it someone disingenuous of certain areas to blame the government for the result, when the unions often negotiated with such a simple all or nothing mentality. Ultimately blaming her after going all-in isn't right.

Very true. An entire country held hostage by a tiny proportion of workers deciding to go on strike. I can definitely see the argument that any private body with that kind of power has to have that power removed.

The end result went far beyond removing that power. It devastated their towns and destroyed families.

This happens a lot in any industry that loses its relevance.

I grew up in Massachusetts. Cities like Lowell and Worcester are very depressed now because they lost what made them big - manufacturing. Should we have subsidized that industry despite it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors? What about the horse and buggy industry when automobiles came around? The whaling industry once petroleum refineries started being built?

Those coal mines were outdated and inefficient. Unfortunately, the government subsidized them for far too long, which created dependence on them as well as the assurance that the jobs would always be there.

Sadly, there is displacement whenever there is a change. But it's far worse to cling to the status quo when it's blatantly impractical. We should be learning the opposite lesson from the hardship created by these mine closings - it's far better to bite the bullet and take the immediate effects than prop up an outdated system and finally get rid of it once it becomes too much to bear.

The change could have been done more smoothly. Or to put it another way, how could it have been worse? I don't pretend to have a perfect solution, but going to some of the areas hit by this is really depressing. The towns may never have been flash to start with but visiting mines and talking to people there is not that different to talking to someone who is describing to you a war they were in.

Or to put it another way, how could it have been worse?

Easy. The coal mining industry could have continued existing for another thirty years, bringing huge losses each year, subsidized by the taxpayer. Like, say, in Poland, which is where you get your cheap labor from, and not the other way around, and the two facts are not entirely unrelated.

Head out to some of the Rust Belt states - New York. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. You'll find towns that are just that - empty and gutted. There are cities that lost more than 80% of their manufacturing jobs in less than 10 years.

It was just the way of the future - the Southeast had lower labor costs, lower cost of land, and advantageous shipping arrangements. The cities just couldn't keep up, and they fell by the wayside.

And yes, it's pretty crappy to go to these cities and tell the people who are struggling there that their businesses deserved to go bankrupt or leave, but there's no other way to do it. The alternative is to subsidize them, and that ends up discouraging progress and also creating a culture of dependence on the government. After all, why invent new stuff if the government will increase the subsidy to keep up with your new manufacturing process?

Letting the free market purge badly competing industry is good for the country and also good for everyone in the long term.

I wouldn't call what Thatcher brought in 'free market' per se, although I dont think this is what you are saying. Many of the formerly nationalised companies that are now supposedly private depend heavily on state subsidies. Her implementation of change swapped one inefficiency for another while setting vast swaths of the country at loggerheads. Other countries have managed to implement painful change without the friction experienced in the UK. It's a sad period of history.

Except that here in the UK we've gone from being held hostage by the miners to being held hostage by bankers - why is one better than the other?

[NB Of course, I want neither!]

Did the bankers choose to simply turn off everyone's electricity in the evening? They aren't holding anyone hostage. They're just taking all the money they can get their hands on and we're choosing to hand it over.

They were in a position where all the ATMs and point of sale machines would stop (Chip-n-Pin is critical in the UK). The UK goverment was actually at the stage of considering whether it would have to implement emergency powers to prevent widespread civil unrest.

So yes - we were being held hostage.

"So yes - we were being held hostage."

Wait, so you're saying that at any time the bankers could have flipped a switch and magically the economy turns back on in a matter of seconds?

So no, we were not being held hostage.

So extortion rather than holding hostages then... "Nice economy you have there, shame if something were to happen to it".

Is that what the bankers said? Is there some collective banker mafia who chose to destroy the economy because we didn't hand over protection money when they came calling? No.

They were greedy and incompetent and we let them do it. No holding hostage. No extortion. No protection rackets. Greed and incompetence and lack of oversight and deregulation.

According to Alistair Darling the did act rather like that after the government had said it was going to bail them out.

I know they weren't literally gangsters - and as you say, we let them do it.

I'm confused by why you say that?

For a start of your talking retail banking rather than trading banking?

All deposits were guaranteed up to £25k which is now £100k. Why the hell would a high street bank profit from cutting of ATM or chip and pin? Do you know how much merchant fees are!

Quite the opposite they do everything they can to make people spend more. Granted they aren't lending money as easily as they used too, but that was what created the mess we were in before.

"Why the hell would a high street bank profit from cutting of ATM or chip and pin?"

They wouldn't have profited - if they hadn't been bailed out they wouldn't be operating at all (RBS was within 2 hours of closing up shop entirely).

Read Alistair Darling's autobiography for his account of the near disaster - it's really rather alarming to read.

So you're assuming all high street banks are RBS? That the government wouldn't have been able to support the payment deposit scheme?

I think you're a little bit confused between retail and commercial banking. It was the latter which was bailed out, not the former. A collapse in it wouldn't have stopped ATMs working, but would have quite likely had dire consequences for the global economy and businesses, simple things like an airline hedging their fuel price would have suddenly turned into an airline losing their money (depending on the product bought it might just be a premium or a the whole lot). In that one simple example imagine the main airlines going bust, owing all the money for previously sold tickets etc. That is the kind of doomsday disaster a collapse of commercial banking could have lead too.

The ATMs would still be there, there just might be no cash in them due to hyperinflation and lack of consumer confidence. However the retail banks would do all they could to keep operating.

As for reading Alistair Darling's autobiography, I don't really get why I would, the guy didn't really get round to doing anything, but had been a cheerleader for the team that deregulated much of the commercial banking industry. People forget that all Thatcher did was to open it up to people outside of Eton, Brown's light touch and continued deregulation helped encourage it to grow and grow.

So the guy was only Chancellor of the Exchequer - what would he know?

If he says that the Government was worried that a collapse of RBS, HBOS and others might have led to the banking system ceasing to function in the UK then I'm inclined to believe him.

You are still confusing retail and commercial banking.

I was struck by this picture of trash accumulating in london during the garbage strike: http://www.businessinsider.com/thatcher-and-the-winter-of-di...

The West was crippled by socialist excesses in the 1970s. There's a reason why Reagan and her won election in the same year.

So your position is the world exists as a comic book, where a person is all good or all bad, and there are no in-betweens? Can't a person just be a person who does some good things, and some bad things, some deserving of respect and others being reprehensible perhaps (and others still being neutral or up for debate)?

I hear what you're saying however that might not be a good example. I'm sure there are people who have good things to say about Hitler (perhaps he was nice to his mum, or patted a kitten once?) but you're not going to win any arguments on that.

So, bearing in mind the above, I'd say that overall Maggie was a pretty awful leader but she inspired a lot of good (but depressing) 80's music.

Hmm, well I think you're going a bit far. She did achieve some OK things as a leader.

Churchill was pretty sexist, homophobic, and all the rest: but he is revered as an excellent wartime leader. Everyone can have significant character flaws and still be, at their core, a good person.

Whether Thatcher was an awful leader or not is certainly a point of debate. There are good arguments either way. She supported Section 28, didn't support sanctions on South Africa, Poll Tax - all of which were bad (I don't necessarily include the miners strike because, as I mentioned in another comment, those industries were fairly doomed anyway - the clashes with the unions heightened its notability. And, anyway, as many people love her for breaking the unions as hate her for it.). But then she did some good things for the economy, and pushed Britain to the front of the financial industry (I'd argue later leaders failed to execute on this strategy, but lets not get too bogged down in arguing merits). Lots of people love her, lots hate her; what they seem to share is how strongly they feel either way!!

So, six and two threes.

But being female does not automatically earn her respect.

I don't think anyone is going to call him a good person, but perhaps an effective leader. Pol Pot was easily just as evil even if he was responsible for fewer deaths, but Pol Pot left nothing so useful as the German autobahns.

On that scale Thatcher is far from evil. Her economic reforms where necessary even if they left many worse off.

I don't find it ironic in the slightest that you Godwin'd a discussion about Thatcher. No sir.

She also kept the UK out of the EU for all intents and purposes... to the point that they threw her out of office doing so...

In retrospect, it seems like that did more benefit to the country than any of her policies did harm.

People should have lots of good things to say about Hitler. To completely demonise him, and turn him into something completely 'other', ignoring how hugely popular and effective he was, makes it too easy to pretend that what happened was a freak aberration, rather than something we need to be actively vigilant against happening again.

"Take a trip to North Lanarkshire and you can still see the impact that the closing of Ravenscraig has had on the area."

Might be worth mentioning that Ravenscraig had a very up to date seamless stainless steel tube rolling mill and brand new blast furnaces just completed when it was closed.

Seamless stainless steel tubes with mapped stress patterns 30cm in diameter and a few metres long used to cost my project about £300 to £400 a pop then. When the facility closed, we had to source from specialist mills in the then West Germany. £2000+.

(I spent some time in Shotts and Paisley around that time)

That's dire. What did you use the pipes for? And was there the option for some private crowd to buy up any of the works? How did your company deal with this - I know materials aren't all the cost of a big job, but a 500% percent rise in material cost is pretty hard for anyone to absorb.

I needed a few of them. We paid.

Ravenscraig steel works was, er, rather large so buying it up would require very significant capital. The rest of the supply chain was being disrupted at the same time.

I don't have a firm view on this; however, history is littered with examples of areas devastated by changing economies and new technology.

Specifically with regards to the miners - that industry had been in substantial decline since the early 1900s and I'd suggest that whatever happened we'd still be looking at devastated areas today.

What happened, though, was as it all came to a head in the 80s, it also coincided with Thatcher's politics of forcing the trade unions to heel. Hence, clusterfuck.

(My interest/view here is academic; I've no real strong opinion on who was "good" or "bad", as I've no connection with what happened and so have no right to hold one)

forcing the trade unions to heel.

Interesting buried metaphor there: treating them like disobedient dogs...