[DanaC]

Pretty much. The Thatcher government did many things, but crippling manufacturing and heavy industry is probably the most remembered. Some of that was arguably a necessary component of moving the country on to a service and value added economy instead of production based economy, but some of it was purely ideological and deeply damaging. Profitable mines closed down. Now, here we are, an island built on coal and we are literally importing coals to Newcastle from the other side of the world.

Like I say, some of what was done can be viewed more positively with hindsight: it allowed us to shift our economy to a different footing. But, and it's a big but: even where such changes were ultimately positive, the way it was done was shameful and cruel. It went alongside a propoganda war against the poor and least equipped to deal with the fall-out of economic change. And that propoganda war justified ever harsher and more draconian responses to the unemployed. So, policies which directly led to increases in unemployment went alongside changes in law that weighted the advantage ever more heavily towards the employer and away from employees, making it an employers market entirely. At the same time that this was occurring the available help for those who couldn't find work was being casually stripped away and their plight being publicly denigrated.

Whole towns died. In some areas unemployment levels reached such a high that there just weren't jobs for people to go to. It is precisely at such times that assistance and understanding is most needed, and and it was precisely at this time that it became most fraught with condemnation and calculated obstruction.

And the shipyards. Gods, the shipyards are gone too. Most of that damage was done during the Thatcher years. She went to war with the dockers just like she went to war with the miners and the nurses, and the teachers, and the firemen, and pretty much every union.

The oldest boatbuilding yard ever found was off the coast of Britain. Hidden under the waters of the Solent, 8000 years old. We've had a functioning navy since the middle of the 10th century, we are a maritime nation, yet we no longer build ships. That one stings. At a symbolic level that one breaks my heart a little.