Ding Dong the wicked witch is dead...

My major issue with Thatcher's policies around labour issues was the dogged refusal to understand that the US model she so admired simply wouldn't work in the UK.

The 'on yer bike' attitude to labour mobility was based on the hugely flawed assumption that workers would move to wherever work was available. In the US that works to a degree unmatched anywhere in the world, with lots of large population centres, relatively cheap housing across the country, and a population that understands that if they don't work they will become very poor very quickly.

In the UK, mobility was always limited by vast cost differentials between north ond south, a benefits system that in some cases actively disincentivised moving to look for work, and the simple fact that such large-scale geographical movement was always going to prove impossible in a country as small as Britain (completely different issues from the industrial revolution before anybody raises that one).

The model was also flawed because - again following the US - it assumed that new industry would spring up to replace the manufacturing that was killed in the process of modernising the economy. Services were never going to replace manufacturing in the numbers required in the short-term, and never would in the single-industry towns and cities.

What we got instead of genuinely awful manufacturers dying and being replaced with a combination of services and better, non-unionised (and therefore competitive) manufacturing was significant areas of the country living in an economic wasteland, whilst others (notably the already relatively better-off south east) boomed on the back of weakened unions. In addition we had good manufacturers being killed along with the bad.

OTOH the unions had to be taken on and brought to some semblance of reality. No amount of left-wing red-tinted spectacles could deny that the country was in an absolute mess when Thatcher took over, and that the unions were helping to destroy industries very effectively without any political intervention being required. Thatcher recognised that, and was helped in no small part by the idiocy of 'leaders' like Scargill, whose own actions (refusing to hold an up-to-date ballot for strike action for example) played right into the Tories hands.

Thatcher's model was flawed, and she seemingly cared very little for the impact of her policies on people and communities, helping to create a far more selfish society as a whole. But OTOH it could be argued that without a certain dogmatic 'toughness' which brought the bad with the good, she'd never have been able to drag the country forward the way she did.

Thatcher will always be hugely divisive. Like all such leaders, I expect she could never quite understand why her own party kicked her out, or why she was detested by so many people across the country.