i guess you weren't living in Rochdale then. It doesn't make for a happy society when people are told to "suck it up". We are still living with many of the consequences of things that were done in the eighties, Northern economies have never recovered and no-one can maintain that the massive sell-off of social housing has been detrimental.
This, again, was a far more complex issue than people now seem to believe. The reality is that towns in the old textile regions were dead in the water by the early 70s. The north lost some 750,000 jobs in the textile industry between 1895 and 1970, and an estimated other 800,000 jobs in associated industries.
This loss really is the cause of industrial blight in many parts of the North. You are looking at some 1.5 million jobs that disappeared over 75 years and were never replaced.
So jobs lost in mining between 1975 and 2010 (a total of 185,000) really pale in comparison to the destruction of Northern industry that occurred prior to the Thatcher period.
Again, more steel jobs were lost under Wilson than Thatcher. A lot of Thatcher's supply side reforms had been circulating through government for decades, but Labour didn't have the ability to be able to implement them because of their trade union associations.
The council housing sell-off is again is a multifaceted beast. It was the largest transfer of wealth from the state to the British working class ever in British history. It was also originally a Labour policy (which is pretty obvious when you consider it); Thatcher only promoted the scheme and increased incentives.
The reason why really had bugger all to do with "becoming a home owning democracy." Back then, local councils' debt fell into the PSBR, and was utterly out of control. The council housing sell-off removed all council liability for maintenance of those homes and injected money into local councils so that their financial situations could begin to improve.
I think people forget that Britain in the late 70s was a very similar situation to Greece today. They forget Britain had to go to the IMF for a loan and that loan came with strings attached.
I think people also forget just how bad things were politically in the 70s. The financial chaos of excessive public expenditure and liabilities (and the tax burden) caused by post war nationalisation had led to a complex social, cultural, and economic paradigm where we were seeing significant numbers of working class males taking part in NF marches, for example.
I say all this as a Northerner born and bred. For all her faults, my belief is that of Thatcher had not achieved power in 1979, we probably would have ended up with complete civil breakdown, and there was a distinct possibility we could have ended up with a military-backed coup or some form of extreme authoritarian government.