To give a fair answer on Mrs Thatcher I would say you can see the seeds of the problems we have today in Mrs Thatcher's policies in the 1980s. She presided over a large structural change in the economy when many manufacturing industries became uncompetitive due to an increasingly globalised market offering cheaper goods from abroad. The writing had been on the wall since the 1970s but we tried to subsidise the industries then to keep them going, the result was strikes, industrial unrest, high inflation. Mrs Thatcher stopped the subsidies, allowed those industries to go to the wall and shifted the UK's source of competitiveness to the financial services sector by deregulating financial services, making it easier to lend and attracting business to the City of London. (She carried on subsidising agricultural sector which annoyed industrial trade unions but then farmers were mainly Tory voters so she kept them onside).

IMO this structural shift made the UK economy more competitive as a whole, it allowed us to focus on something we were good at, but it did create winners and losers, in communities that had used to be based on the industries that had died out you now got a cycle of unemployment, poverty and crime and Mrs Thatcher's government didn't do much in the way of adjustment to help them adapt to the modern economy.

However the irony is now a lot of the problems the Tories blame the last Labour government for, were really down to Mrs Thatcher. George Osborne talks about how the UK suffered the biggest contraction out of any of the developed countries during the global financial crisis, and the worst deterioration in public finances. This is because the global crash was in the financial services sector and the reason we were most exposed to it was because of Mrs Thatcher's policies re-orienting the economy around finance. That's why we faced such a big bail out bill for the banks as well. Had we remained a manufacturing oriented economy we would have not been as exposed.

Also the Tories blame Labour for leaving the UK the country with the highest level of household debt in Europe and having gone on a debt binge of personal credit. Again this is because lending was all deregulated in the 1980s. Before then only a small number of lenders (eg building societies) were able to give mortgages, she made it easier to get credit as she wanted people to borrow to get mortgages and get their own homes. She wanted the UK to become a society of homeowners not renters and this is what we became, but the flip side of a society of homeownership is everybody has mortgages and then can get extra credit secured against their property, hence households have high levels of debt. This doesn't happen in other European countries where they are more renters than home owners.

And then you get the best of all, the Tories blame Labour for not regulating the banks...thats true, but the Tories were never supporting banking regulation. The reason the banks had little regulation started off in the Big Bang of 1987 when she cut down all the red tape and rules and regulations from banks to encourage business to come to the City.

So unfortunately the Tory government now is reaping the long term consequences of Mrs Thatcher's policy but they are trying to make out it was all down to Labour.

And steel, don't forget what she did for towns like Consett and Motherwell (Ravenscraig).

Were you struggling with the question about the past tense?
How ironic of you to be calling others plebs.

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.

That's a full and fair and assessment. She's a divisive and polarizing figure, IMO, because the confrontational/belligerent attitude of her government fractured (an already divided) British society. You were either with her or you could love off and die. The openess of the mutual disdain you see between the leftish liberal types and the conservative right on here has its roots in that time. It was a formative moment in Britons realizing that they don't actually like each other all that much.

Right here.

I think a state funeral would be a terrible idea.

For all the good she did, sadly it was undone by what is widely perceived to be (rightly or wrongly, depending on your view) by all the bad she did. There would be protests and all sorts.

Whatever your view on Thatcher, when she dies, she is entitled to a funeral that doesn't involve politics, protests, declarations of joy/grave dancing et al.

Thatcher freed people (a nice by-product, but not the intended purpose) as miners from ruining their health.
That's about the only good she did.

It was easy and short-termism to just let the CEGB (as it was then) buy the cheapest coal it could.
Yes it seemed to make sense and it does if when everything else is factored in it is still the cheapest.
What needs factoring in are things like...

The money going out of the country instead of staying in the country with British Coal and then flowing down to it's workforce into the communities and flowing down to it's suppliers in this country etc. etc.

The money then needed for rejeneration, retraining, unemployment benefits, welfare payments etc..

The money needed for redundancy payments.

The cost of damage to communities, lives, etc

There will be others ....

But were those factored in?
If they weren't, my bet would be our coal was cheaper to use in our own power stations than foreign coal in the long run.

Although, I think it's good that people are not allowed to ruin their health in pursuit of their living. I know advances had been made in dust supression, but dust got into lungs still.
And mechanisation would have reduced the manpower anyway.

I wonder how long it will be before we get another female Prime Minister?
It's not looking promising is it?
Did Maggie have any bearing do we think?

Well, you never can tell.
Footage exists where she said herself that she didn't think she'd see a female Prime Minister in her lifetime.

Just to add to the explanations given: not only did she preside over an era of pushing home ownership – that, of itself, was not a problem. The problems came because she also banned councils from re-investing funds from sales of council houses into new social housing. We've had a housing shortage ever since – with the inevitable result of property prices going through the roof. And that links in with the recent/ongoing crisis, as explained earlier.