Before she came to power I worked in a large engineering company as a Training Instructor charged with the selection, training and welfare of apprentice engineers - about 80 - 90 of them. The company had won the Queen's Award for Export Achievement, we had a full order book and overtime was worked 2 night and Saturday morning regularly.
We needed to expand and create more jobs so a new site was bought and work commenced on the construction of the new factory which was budgeted at £6Million. It was anticipated that 300 new jobs would be created on the opening of the new factory, with a further 300 at the end of the first year of opening.
Then Thatcher arrived and just before we were due to move to the new factory, redundancies were announced. Three years later we were all out of a job.
Today, that £6 Million custom- built engineering works is now a Cash & Carry warehouse.
You can guess my thoughts about Thatcher, and that's before I get started on the mines, shipyards, steelworks, and Shildon (google Shildon sometime) We have a dock here in Geordieland and it's called Tyne Dock. It was built to export coal from Geordieland to all parts of the world - including London. Today it imports coal from all over the world where it is sent by rail in wagons made in Romania and hauled by locomotives made in Canada to our power stations which are sitting on top of millions of tons of coal in Yorkshire, and all this while Shildon which was a major wagon manufacturing plant is a museum and the locomotive works at Darlington is an ASDA supermarket and Doncaster, Crewe and Loughborough are doing SFA.
What she could never get her head around was the fact that it was never "just" a mine, or "just" a steel works or just whatever .... it was ALSO about the infrastructure - all the other businesses and people who survived to serve the industries and the folk who worked in them whether it be the factories making the steel, the castings, the machinery to wagons to carry the products, the corner shops, the pubs & clubs and the breweries, bakers and candlestick makers - they all fell just like dominoes.
Her "policies" were all for a short-term fix and her replacements for the lost industries were / are finance & banking etc. and look where that led and that's before we even think about the privatisation of the energy, water and rail companies.
There's a joke doing the rounds just now that Thatcher's been dead for only a day and already Saint Nick has been to the Jobcentre to sign on and she's closed down 3 furnaces so far. It may be a joke, but I'm betting it isn't far from the truth!!
I have here a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale that I'd like to pour on her grave - just after I've filtered it through my kidneys. The woman was pure evil personified.
