""Just part of her legacy was the destruction of actual manufacturing in this country and the handing of control and power to city spivs - and thus the recent economic problems.""

Well I suppose if you are going to tell a lie you might as well tell a big one.

UK manufacturing had been on the skids for donkeys years before Maggie came to Downing Street.

Ruined by the real spivs, the union shop stewards and conveners, with their insatiable demands for more and more unsustainable wage increases.

You can't be competitive with overseas manufacturing if you lose millions of man/hours every year to wildcat strikes, and unjustified walkouts.

After a while, the genuine grievances, which should have and would have been dealt with, were buried in a morass of Union generated confusion.

Wilson and Callaghan pandered to their masters, who supplied most of their funding. Heath had no chance with his lame duck government, and the unions ran riot through British manufacturing.

Business dwindled through the seventies, as sensible buyers went elsewhere.

That is when Maggie became PM, and if she hadn't Callaghan would certainly not have reversed the trend. It would simply have spiralled to destruction even faster. It had already gone far beyond the possibility of recovery.

My previous post and this one are both based on what I saw with my own eyes, and what I experienced in the workplace.

I once sat in a laboratory, in pitch darkness, with a bulb on the bench in front of me, and waited four unproductive hours for an electrician to come and replace the blown one in the light fitting.

I was not alled either to fit it, or to bring a desk lamp through from the next door office. "Union rules son! You'll 'ave 'em all out the gate".

Don T