I had an agreement with my schoolmate that we would have a pint when she died. It didn't happen because he had emigrated by then and my 'hatred' towards her had probably mellowed, as life goes on. Wasn't it her old chemistry lecturer who said she thought Thatcher was a 'narrow and destructive' politician? Or was the phrase divisive. I also remember being told off at school by my own chemistry teacher. The first school morning after the Brighton bomb, I said 'it's shame they missed her'. This prompted a rebuke from said teacher. I always remember feeling surprised that anyone would defend her, such was the animosity in our parts against the witch.
Part of my childhood was right at the centre of the 1984/85 Miners' Strike, in an area affected by pit closures. In consequence, my own initial politics was well to the Left, and at one point Marxist. Additionally, most of my father's ancestors from the beginning of industrialism were miners. I mention this to explain that I am steeped in the sort of politics and attitude that you refer to - but I matured and moved on from it.
One well-aimed jibe Neil Kinnock did make about her (from the dispatch box) is that she was a "crank". On cool reflection, I think she and certain other high-flying Tories had an intellectual bent that led them into neo-liberal crankery - what became known as the New Right (not to be confused with the more traditionalist French New Right). It then became known as Thatcherism (thanks to some black sociologist whose name I've momentarily forgotten).
This current included Heath initially - the first half of his premiership was proto-thatcherite and some of Thatcher's ideas, such as Right to Buy, actually began or were first tested under the Heath government before it reverted back to the consensus social-democracy typical of that era.
I think Thatcher's crankishness or ideological over-focus meant she developed a blind spot for certain things. She was from Grantham, which is a quiet Lincolnshire market town. Her father was a grocer. Nothing wrong with that, and it clearly influenced her. She became an industrial chemist (an ice cream factory), but that sounds like quite an abstract and aloof role. How much did she really understand about industry? Did she have a keenness for it, and interest in it culturally? An intellectual curiosity for how things work, as opposed to just theorising, testing, observing and explaining things passively?
Grantham is not too distant from the Nottinghamshire coal fields, but it is very distant - a world apart, really - from the more socialist-minded West Riding coalfields and she either didn't understand the importance of industry for social cohesion or refused to consider it. Thatcherism was extreme Misesian economics, in effect applied Social Darwinism: all about the rigours of the market and competitive pressures.
Her attitude harked back to Manchester Liberalism (or you could call it Gladstonian liberalism, which was a later very similar school of thought). She was really a Liberal and a liberal (both large 'L' and small 'l') rather than a Tory proper. Her father was a local Liberal politician.
Her view and attitude was literally this:
If you can buy and import brown coal from Australia cheaper than it can be extracted in domestic mines, then it is OK to put British miners out of work.
But...but...but...I hear you say, what about all the jobs, the traditions, the feeder businesses that depend on miners' wives' spending and the local economic activity it generates? What about energy security? What about patriotism, manliness, pride in doing a man's job and the wider important social benefits this brings in society by retaining a traditional male role? What about all this Missus Thatcher, well, eh? Eh?
Missus Thatcher's haughty Manchester Liberal response: "We're not giving outdoor relief to the working classes, you know."
That is literally what she says about it in her memoirs. She uses those exact words. You can look it up.
That is the logic of a small-minded provincial grocer from somewhere like Grantham who votes Old Liberal or Tory and sports a British bulldog in his grocer's shop while screwing over his countrymen due to his narrow-minded, myopic, tone-deaf attachment to economic abstractions.
Still, no-one can deny she was one of this country's more impactful Prime Ministers. Her personality and intellect were those of a 'Great Man'. If she had developed a more rounded perspective on things, she could have been great, but as it is, she did too much wrong. The state was expanded under her premiership, not reduced; she was soft on immigration; she paved the way for Blairism due to her media-driven style of government; she gave into the IRA (despite impressions to the contrary), she gave into Europe (again, despite loud protestations to the contrary). And more.
But I will save all that for another time.
