Margaret Thatcher

How can columnist Rob Merrick (Echo, April 30) say “it’s impossible to explain to under-35s just how awful the Eighties were to live through”, without mentioning the terrible traumas of the Seventies, the support of totally inefficient nationalised industries, the union-dominated attempts to wreck our economy? Was this Eighties’ pain not as a result of previous feeble government, which brought the country to its knees? Yes, we were rescued by the IMF.

Mr Merrick also referred to “the facade of economic miracle”. Why is China, after so long in the backwoods, flourishing as it adopts similar enterprise. Mrs Thatcher would have known that boundaries are needed; these were so thoughtlessly removed by our current brainbox of a Prime Minister, but somehow it is so easy to blame Mrs Thatcher.

How strange, if “Thatcher was detested” to the extent suggested, that she won two further elections. Maybe the majority who did not let themselves be blinded by political prejudice knew she valued straight talking and prospects of the country, rather than the past 12 years of kidology that see us on the verge of IMF rescue again.

John Heslop, Gainford, near Darlington.