Re: Yeuch...
she condemned tens of thousands of families to life on the dole across generations
If you look at the history of the heavy engineering industries, it's one of casual employment, poor wages, ill health and environmental contamination. I grew up in a mining area - the place was littered with spoil heaps, coal waste was just dumped on beaches to be washed away by the sea and men died early, usually from a combination of silicosis and smoking. Nevertheless, there was an almost Stakhanovite worship of the miner - a home for the elderly had to be built with smaller rooms than would otherwise have been possible as the local authority insisted it be fitted with coal-fired heating (which meant a large and expensive automatic feeder system) to help ensure there was continuing demand for what the "lads" produced. Every purpose was distorted in favour of what was in reality a small proportion of the work force.
It could have ended differently, but it had to end. It's all very well looking back, misty-eyed, at the pre-Thatcher times as a socialist nirvana, but it was in fact the fag end of the Victorian era, shorn of any significant investment and entirely dependent on constant government intervention. Not that all government intervention was necessarily bad - Edward Heath was pretty much obliged to nationalise Rolls Royce and that worked out quite well - but by their very nature governments can't really do long term planning and history shows more intervention failures than successes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
