I was challenged in a letter sent in last week by Conservative Group Leader Cllr.

Syd Lloyd to get my facts right about Margaret Thatcher and "read my history rather more carefully". So Ive taken the time to look at the facts and provide Mr Lloyd with an accurate breakdown of Thatchers destructive ruling. If Britain had been, as he says, in the "iron grip of the trade unions" in the 1970s, it had most certainly been in the "iron grip" of Margaret Thatcher throughout the 1980s. She not only destroyed our mining industry but devastated many Northern economies and communities in the process as well. In 1983 there were 199 pits in Britain, today there are only 3 left. I hardly see this as evidence of Thatcher "setting British industry free". Industry actually fell from contributing 40% of the UK's GDP in 1979 to just 34% in 1990 and has since fallen more dramatically to 21%. She took great pride in stripping British workers of their jobs and unemployment soared as a result, peaking at 11.9% in 1984, a level not seen since The Great Depression. At the peak of Labours socalled Winter of Discontent, unemployment was at 1.1m, while under Thatchers rule it doubled to over 3m. Thatchers whole reign was characterised by detrimental change. Child poverty doubled to 3.3 million, pensioner poverty rose to 4.1 million and distribution of wealth became even more unequal. She didnt liberate the British economy, she hugely unbalanced it. As well as an unequal economy, she also promoted an unequal society through enforcing Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which banned teachers from discussing the concept of homosexuality in schools. In terms of health, her insistence on privatising part of the NHS by contracting out domestic, catering and laundry services led to a huge increase in hospital bugs like MRSA, as the need for profit was placed before the needs of patients. On International affairs, he says that she stood up to dictators, but she also stood alongside them as well. She was a staunch supporter of one of the worlds most brutal dictators, President Pinochet of Chile, whose reign of terror enforced military rule on a country which was once seen as a beacon of democracy. Her actions both at home and abroad seemed totally lacking in compassion, perhaps best demonstrated through her decision to order the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War, in spite of the fact that it was 200 miles out of the exclusion zone and heading in the opposite direction. Its worth stating that we are not, as David Cameron recently claimed, all Thatcherites now. There are many of us left in this country, young and old alike, who believe that there is such a thing as society, who support the collective provision of welfare, and who see the pursuit of profit at all costs as a vice not a virtue. For the sake of local communities across the whole of this country, now that weve buried Margaret Thatcher, its time to bury Thatcherism itself.