sally cinnamon wrote: ... The UK wasn't subsidising the coal it was importing. It was importing it from places like Poland where their own government was subsidising it, which isn't the same thing as us subsidising the imports. Yes you are right she didn't subsidise our coal but if it needed those heavy subsidies it was a declining industry.
She brought in McGregor specifically to close down pits that were "uneconomic" but the real reason for the closures was nothing to do with economics, it was purely and simply political, to smash the unions.
And illegally carried out too, using the police as a private army.
Scargill (whom I despised almost as much as Thatcher) did point out that if coal received the same %age of subsidy as nuclear, the coal board would be able to give away the coal for free with some money thrown in as well.
Obviously, in empirical terms the amounts would not be comparable but it did point-up the subjective way that the government labelled some things as uneconomic but not others.
The pits could have been closed in a controlled and gradual manner but they weren't, the labour market was suddenly flooded, especially in one-industry areas (which was, of course, another means of exerting power).
The rocketing unemployment made an utter mockery of the posters they had put up in 1979 showing enormous dole queues with the slogan "Labour's not working".
I can't remember which of the tory chancers ... whoops, sorry, chancellors ... of that period said that mass unemployment was "a price well worth paying" but, for me, that summed-up the attitude of the Thatcher era, they didn't want to run the country for the benefit and well-being of its populace but for the benefit of those who Thatcher termed "one of us".
Much has been said about how bright Thatcher was, for me this is hugely overstated, her grasp of economics was broad-brush at best and her policies emanated from certifiable nutters like Keith Joseph (who thought that poverty would be eliminated if you sterilised poor people) and her poisonous husband Denis.
She was a cruel and hypocritical bully.
Sure, there were things that needed to be sorted out but Thatcher's supposedly-sensible-monetarist hammer blows rained down indiscriminately, except on the rich.
The same attitude prevails today, Cameron has simply stuck a "Big Society" label on it.
If the label said "OK pal, we've got your money, now you're on your own" it would mean exactly the same.
So, should Thatcher get a state funeral?
Of course not, putting aside (if that were possible) the harm that she did ... in these austere times, it simply cannot be justifed.