Maggie's destruction of the mining industry in particular and of trade unions in general was entirely ideologically-led. The long-term upshot of that is a bogus high-employment statistic (betrayed by the fact that productivity refuses to go up) that forgets to tell us that millions of jobs are now enforced "self-employed," part-time, temporary, seasonal or, worst of all, zero-hours contracts, and that vast numbers of unemployed young people are not allowed to claim jobseekers, instead forced on to fake apprenticeships where they will learn how to make tea and sweep floors. Every part of this is directly attributable to Thatcher's "legacy." That is the culture that she promoted, ruthlessly. We now live in a country that makes very little and which relies on an out-of-control "financial sector." We rely largely for our energy on outside sources, not all of which we should feel happy with. Millions of us are standing up in clothes that were all made in China. Catastrophically, Blair did nothing to reverse the trend, riding as he did a rather lucky wave of fake prosperity (Fake? He oversaw a massive increase in the gulf between rich and poor) until the whole unregulated house of cards collapsed in 2008. That's all Thatcher's legacy, mate. The icing on the cake was her cosying up to Reagan's detestable regime and her support for PInochet. She cultivated an extremely selfish devil-take-the-hindmost society so successfully that the country stands by as thousand of sick people are stripped of their benefits and thousands more are arbitrarily "sanctioned" (nice euphemism for having the bread taken out of your mouth) by arrogant jobsworths at job centres for the most trivial of bureaucratic transgressions. It all makes Scargill and Red Robbo look like a bunch of angels in comparison. Many large companies with respectable names that may be sewn into your underpants won't even recognise trade unions at all, their employees now at the mercy of management-led "staff associations." Come a long way from Grunwick, haven't we? All Thatcher's legacy. I'm all right Jack and sod the rest. Especially if they're sick, unemployed, mentally ill, old or foreign.