The thing is Stern...you can have economic reform, but to just leave places to rot is hardly good governance. It showed a callous lack of compassion or understanding, and a contempt for parts of the country. The NUM and other militant unions such as the printers and dock workers, brought a lot of trouble on themselves, but under Thatcher, the industries were left to complete against subsidied competitors - coal industry was left to compete against heavily subsidised coal from Sweden and Canada...it was hardly a level playing field - it was just an ideology that is still unproven, just still in vogue. Sometimes it seems ideologues give the impression that society and people exist soley to support the economy, when in fact, it is the economy that is a tool to support society in general.

Pericles...I think I will agree to disgree - we could go round in circles...as you say, there is always a subjective element in memory and experience.

“It showed a callous lack of compassion or understanding, and a contempt for parts of the country.”

Previously, the levels of subsidy which those parts of the country demanded were only made available by a “callous lack of compassion and understanding” to the plight of other tax payers, forced to subsidise incompetent and inefficient nationalised industries.

“the industries were left to complete “

As they should

against subsidied competitors”

The cycle of perpetual and ever increasing subsidy is a bottomless pit into which the UK economy was being drawn deeper and deeper, by the sort of lunatic economics which Margaret Thatcher opposed.

And to further respond to your comment I rely on the Iron Lady herself

"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first....”

Perpetuating economic stagnation through the subsidisation of nationalised industry is economic treason. The only outcome was to take UK to the brink of collapse, as was seen in the mid 1970’s under the incompetence of Wilson and Callaghan, who were the lapdogs of the NUM and other militant unions such as the printers and dock workers.

Every tax is an impost and every subsidy a waste of competitive opportunity.

Subsidies are what governments do for expediency but it is like building up the banks of the River.

- When the banks eventually break, the flood plain and devastations is far broader than if proper dredging had been undertaken in the first place.

Margaret Thatcher simply did what should have been done 20 years previous.