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Back to the thread (well said Howard), with the miners strike you did have two leaders in Scargill and Thatcher who were determined to take eachother on. Scargill was prepared to use any means he could to bring down the government and Thatcher was prepared to bankrupt the country to destroy the unions. Neither was particularly admirable in their respective extremism. The miners were caught in the middle, with the majority simply fighting for their jobs.
When it was over more and more legislation had to be introduced to replace the valid day to day work once done by the unions in employee protection, health and safety etc. In many ways this was fairer in as much as it spread that protection to all those who could not, or did not want to, join a union. In practice, as always happens when lawyers get their hands on something, the legislation kept growing and the worker with his legal aid lawyer would usually find themselves up against employers with banks of lawyers able to twist everything.
As for Thatchers legacy, it can be summed up in one word, greed. Compare the rises in wages and house prices between 1949 - 1969 against the rises between 1969 - 1989. Under Thatcher it became almost illegal not to have a bank account, giving more power to bankers. The seemingly worthy "right to buy" was introduced and then tied in with legislation preventing councils from building replacement housing stock. This led to a decline in the building industry (at a loss of far too many jobs) and opened the way for increased property speculation with housing subject to increasingly higher profit seeking rises.
When Labour got back in, instead of trying to slow or halt such moves (such as allowing councils to use the money from right to buy for new building) tried to buffer the rampant cost rises with increasingly expensive 'buffers'. It has been a battle of ideologies all along and the only ones that suffer are the mass of working people who get sucked into the political see-saw by politicians who only ever see things in red or blue.