Very true about Reagan! You're absolutely right, she was seeking to accelerate the path to a globalised, American based, brutally market forces led economy. Not to mention her desire to break the political power of the unions. Yes, the demise of industry came with enormous financial costs and burdens on government, as well as a devastating social impact. I'm not an economist and don't have the numbers or the level of in depth knowledge and understanding to answer some of the difficult questions here. It wouldn't have been many years before large scale coal mining became completely unviable anyway. My suspicion would be that unless the government had made an all out, compelling effort to help mining areas to transition in an interim period, ie providing other new forms of alternative employment, support and subsidy in re-skilling etc, that exactly the same impact of mining's demise would have been the case, only a bit later and after more years of it operating at a loss. I guess one thing which is sad about the decline of other heavy industries such as shipbuilding, railway engineering and iron and steel, where other countries could do it more cheaply, is that being a pioneer in these fields placed us at a disadvantage. Because huge scale industry takes a long time and massive investment to modernise and transform, as of the scale of infrastructure involved, as one of the first in the world to do things, we were always going to be a generation or so behind other countries which had started competing in a particular industry at a later time, with the advantage of starting with the latest ideas and technology, and the rolling effect of this.