I am glad to think that Mrs Thatcher's legacy will outlive your spite (and a pretty disgusting read this thread is; have none of you any shame?).

You talk as though she was solely responsible for the death of coal-mining in this country; she wasn't. Coal had been in decline for years beforehand (incidentally, now that coal-fired powerstations are being closed in an effort to lower Britain's carbon footprint, just what do you think would happen to the coal if we were still mining it?).

Before she was elected, jobs were being lost in numbers that dwarfed anything under her tenure. Between 1957 and 1963, 264 pits closed. Between 1963 and 1968, more than a third of a million miners left the industry. In 1967 alone there were almost 13 thousand forced redundancies. Under Harold Wilson one pit closed every week. By 1970, when the Conservatives (under Heath) were elected, there were just 300 pits left – just a third of the number of a quarter of a century earlier.

Margaret Thatcher's government inherited a demoralised coal industry which had seen productivity collapse by 6 percent in five years. Nevertheless, it made attempts at rescue (oh, but you can't give her credit for that, can you? It doesn't fit in with your hateful script): in 1981 a subsidy of £50 million was given to industries which switched from cheap oil to expensive British coal. Note that adjective: British coal was relatively expensive, but British taxpayers had to subsidise industries to use it. Later, a further £200 million was injected into the industry. Companies, such as the Central Electricity Generating Board, were banned from importing cheaper foreign coal and 3 million tonnes of coal piled up at Rotterdam at a cost to the British taxpayer of £30 million per year.

The coal industry was losing £1.2M per day. Three British pits out of four were losing money. In 1984 it cost £44 to mine a tonne of British coal, but America, Australia, and South Africa were selling it on the world market for £32.

That's what killed the British coal industry: inefficiency, not Margaret Thatcher.

I suspect that you direct all this hatred and spleen at Mrs Thatcher because her time in power has shown up your unthinking left-wing ideology for what it is: terminally ineffective as well as terminally dreary.