I’ll make me slightly unconventional point as short as possible to avoid producing an essay, but essentially it goes like this.

The Trade Unions were destroying Britain’s economy. That’s not to say everything that unions did then, or do now, was bad, but during the 1970′s they did a hell of a lot of stupid things. Particularly, they went on strike far too much and it was unqestionably damaging the economy.

Such was the ideological determination of the hard left, who were controlling the unions, that it was inevitable that they could only be beaten by an equally strong opposing ideogical force. They negotiation and common ground approach of Heath and Wilson had failed and Callaghan’s government was little more than a catastrophe.

So although this is a wider point, for me it is is summed up by the ultimate showdown: Thatcher vs Scargill. The miner’s strike was ultimately not about the close of mines and loss of jobs. That was what started it, but by the end it was about the hard left, embodied in scargill, trying to undermine the democratic process and bring down the government.

Anyway, I shall stop before I go off on a tangent about Scargill’s betrayal of his union members. Essentially my point is that Thatcher was definitely a good thing for Britain because the unions had made it clear that they could not be tamed gently. If not for Thatcher we would have just languished on through strike after strike until someone else did what she did.

More seriously, it’s not a conincidence that the posting which posed a question got the most responses.

That said, I think there is a point that people in the party tend to talk relatively little about economic issues comapred to other policy area.

Hopefully some of the pieces on here (especially those from Tim Leunig) are helping to remedy that.

As soon as the hint was dropped, we saw proposals for a belt of commuter suburbs along the M40 outside Oxford, a major shopping centre between Hook and Hinchley Wood, and 3,000 houses in a wood next to East Horsley Station.

And what were we told last week? Brown is going to relax the Green Belt so that thousands of Noddy-houses can be built in the Surrey countryside.

Thatcher appears to be senile because she spent 40 odd years inhaling her husband’s fag effluent, and shared his taste for lotions and tinctures. Thatcher was a loyal supporter of the tobacco industry, so she can’t complain.

A question to be debated will always attract more comments than a position baldly stated, because there’s always something to discuss.

Just sayin’.

And, you know, we CAN all do a reconstruction of the Jazz funeral in Live and Let Die on the day…

A number of posters above have tagged her as being respoinsible for the deindustrialisation of the UK. That is massively unfair. She may have supervised this process, but it was fundamentally driven not by her but by the development of manufacturing technology. I have heard Nick Clegg blame Mrs T for the job losses in Sheffield, but the fact remains that a mostly automated steel plant with just a handful of employees can now produce more steel than a big plant with thousands of employees did in the 70′s. In the 70s, we contrived to spend huge amounts of money trying to preserve outdated processes in the nationalised industries, and this was simply unsustainable. Sure the miners’ strike may have been unpleasant, but then there was very little scope for compromise. Certain unions had made it abundantly clear that they did not want to see any progress at all. In such a polarised enviroment it is hard to strike a middle ground.

I have, in all seriousness, heard Lib Dem supports likening Thatcher’s handling of the miners to Stalin’s purges. All I can say is that such people obviously have a very narrow experience of life outside the UK.

In terms of her awareness for civil liberties, I think that Thatcher had a great deal greater awareness of the issues here than the current government. And, in fact, the way in which she showed how economic liberalism can improve the lot of the average civilian was a huge contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviert Block, and the subsequent incorporation of much of that into the EU, which remains one of the most major global civil liberties achievements of recent years.

The other big area that she is accused of is the breakdown of society. Again, I think that this accusation is massively unfair. There were a number of pressures in operation at the time. For instance, one of the big changes that really took off during the Thatcher era was double income families. This apears to have led directly to a number of less desirable consequences — less contact time between children and parents, the emptying of dormitory suburbs during the day and so on. But it is a hard balance to strike, because do we really want to go back to the assumption that women should be homemakers? Which maybe explains why, for changes like this, Thatcher had a broad range of support.

There are other things which she should have done, IMHO. The education system was allowed to fester, and welfarism was not really tackled at all. But then I think she is generally accused of having tried to do too much rather than too little

To use benns formulation there are sign posts and weather vanes in Politics. She was the ultimate sign post.

If you add to that being the first woman and the longest serving PM of the democratic age and three election wins you could argue she is a Titan.

What ever I tink of her she’ll enter the Pantheon and school children i 150 years time will write essays ranking her with gladtone, peel, lloyd george and Churchill.

I do not care for most of her policies and I have NEVER voted for one of her governments but I will not rejoice in the death of a fellow human being whose major flaw in my view is to hold a differnt political position to me.

Good or bad ? well I’m not up for a 10000 esay at tis time in the morning!

We were warned, but we voted for Blair – who she spawned. Brown’s first act was to be photographed with her.

Thatcher’s small town prejudice cast a huge shadow over late 20th century Britain but it is undeniable that busting the unions was necessary – and supported by the Liberals at the time.

When Elvis Costello wrote ‘tramp the dirt down’ I genuinely thought it would be her epitaph – but she (as usual) outstayed her welcome and has ended up as a senile, decrepid old harridan – and that unfortunately for her will be how she will be remembered.

I’m no longer bothered about tramping any dirt down – she needs to go with dignity, which I’m afraid her useless offspring or her spotty worshippers are incapable of accepting – hence the obscenity of a state funeral at a cost of £2m that the UK tax payer can’t afford.

So on whichever side you fall regarding whether she was good for you or for the whole of society (and I don’t think she was for either, on balance), she gave our democracy a definite boost.

To be the target of vitriol is the price of fame.

A polarising figure.

Given recent policy developments, I had been wondering whether Margaret Thatcher might be a viable candidate for the Lib Dem party presidency this time round.

Yes, I understood the point. I just thought the way you put it was rather ironic – if it was meant to be a point in her favour.