Margaret Thatcher - a looking back.

An astonishing fact: 290 coal mines closed under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and 160 mines were closed under Margaret Thatcher.

Just one reality check of the many that we should consider when looking at the "spontaneous" outpouring of hate to Mrs T. It appears it is convenient for the Left to forget that the writing was on the wall for the coal mines long before Thatcher came along.

But it is the print unions that I should mention, having been at the hypocentre of their power. I was a Fleet Street hack and a floater - in and out of various places. Except that I was unusual. Me and Bill Bryson were very unusual in that neither of us belonged to the NUJ and both of us worked the Street of Shame. I wonder what happened to him?

The print union leaders were no better than Kim Jong-un. They were war mongers and tyrants. It was very difficult indeed to get work in or out of Fleet Street unless you were in the NUJ. In fact, we were a hated breed. I refused to join because they operated a closed shop. They did this in order to call all the shots. The stories of how this undermined the press are legion and how Rupert Murdoch broke them should be studied as a paradigm of the triumph of sense and good. Once, while I was working in a radio studio the engineer just walked out and went for a cigarette. The tape ran out and we were not allowed to touch anything due to the union stranglehold. He got away with what these days would rightly be a sackable offense. The printers used to sign in for their shift and then spend the day at one of the many all-day pubs. They would do about 2 hour's work in total and get paid fantastic sums. The paper I worked on had a sub-editor whose other job was at the Telegraph and a lay-out man whose other job was at the Guardian. In order to file stories, you had to put an NUJ sticker on the top of the copy in order to get it printed. We had a hooky roll of stickers and used them, but the fact remains; the unions had a stranglehold on the news industry. The only place you still see this is at the BBC where the single fact that they extort money on pain of prison in order to watch television allows the Corporation to remain in the hands of the Marxists.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Thatcher changed this. What she did was unmask the tyrants and show to all the world that they could be defeated. And they were.

Nobody wants to return to that world. In 1979 Britain was sick. The streets were covered in rotting rubbish and we were the poor man of Europe. Our cars fell to pieces and our service industries were execrable. Neither Neil Kinnock or Gordon Brown or Tony Blair have lifted the poor out of poverty, but they have allowed the rich to get richer. Tony Blair took us to war on a raft of lies. Brown sold our gold reserves at rock bottom rates. Both have tried to undermine our identity and our freedom.

I shall not rejoice when Brown or Blair die. I am afraid that in life, they did far more damage to the common wealth than Margaret Thatcher ever did.

Of course, the worst of it is that there has been nobody since who engaged the public, and let us face it, Thatcher was only there because a majority of the British People wanted her.

The Left are outraged, but it is good to note they they are actually a tiny but noisy minority. They want to remove the personal freedoms that Thatcher and Churchill bequeathed to us, and that is the tyranny we must at all costs resist.