BigGitDad Exactly- Thatcher decided to avenge Ted Heath's defeat at the hands of the miners -and by extension the labour movement- (small L) by systematically destroying the latter, taking down the former with it as collateral damage.
That the mining industry was already on its uppers (my dad being the 5th generation of miners in his family) cannot be denied....what could have been done though was some kind of forethought as to what all these families, who for generations had worked in the mines going to do...In my Nottinghamshire town, when I was a teenager, the boys either stayed on at school, or went down the pit. And now? 20 -odd years later? They stay on at school or stand outside the precinct with their girlfriend's buggy while she nips into Iceland and this is the second generation to have done it.
Thatcher also liked the idea of putting the nail in the coffin of the mines so that Britain could use all that lovely North Sea gas and oil instead....and now that that's on its uppers, as you say, we unfortunately are looking to Russia....(the irony, given Thatcher and her commie-bashing- that we now go cap in hand to them for help)
That's one part of her legacy.
Another is that I went to university and my parents never had to pay a penny for it. (My Italian dp can't understand why that would happen under the Tories and yet under Labour, people have to pay.....)
I don't like the woman. She hasn't become sweet ol' Miss Marple just because she's old. I hated her in the 80's, but that was de rigeur. I threw eggs at her, and went on marches. (and laugh at my teenage angst now)
I'll see her passing much as I did that of the Queen Mother. Old people die. Dying makes them neither saints nor sinners. I don't think the history books will see her legacy in an altogether positive light. She's not going to be treated like Churchill. (her war wasn't quite grandiose enough, for all the engineering of it and lies she told during it)