prices we are seeing now and will continue seeing."

Mr Kitchen continued: "Her policies still have an influence today, policies of greed and profit before all else.

"I only hope when Margaret Thatcher is buried, they bury her policies with her."

Darren Vaines, 47, a former miner who worked at Ackton Hall Colliery near Pontefract, West Yorkshire, and was on strike for the entire 12 months of the dispute, said: "It's a very strange emotional feeling because her death brings back a lot of memories and opens up a wound that has never really healed.

"The cut went so deep people have never been able to forget about it. It's something they can never get out of their system."

Mr Vaines, whose friend and colleague David Jones was killed aged 24 when violenceerupted on a picket line at Ollerton, Nottinghamshire in 1984, said many communities have never come to terms with Mrs Thatcher's actions.

"I was only a kid at the time of the strike really. It hurt but not as much as some of the older guys who had families and mortgages. It split communities and it split families," he said.

"The people who went back into work were subjected to extreme brutality from their colleagues. When you look back it's hard to think what they went through. But that's the situation they put us in and you're talking about people's livelihood."

Mr Vaines, who was at the infamous Battle of Orgreave where police and prt any concern and we were just collateral damage.

"She left communities with nothing. It wasn't just the