By Peter Apps, Political Risk correspondent FASLANE (Reuters) - Outside Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde, campaigners who have fought for decades for Britain to abandon nuclear weapons believe that they are closer than ever to victory. In the 1980s, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brushed aside the protesters, saying that in the Cold War, atomic arms made the world a safer place.

Margaret Thatcher was laid to rest on Wednesday with military pageantry and pockets of protests, in a funeral that reflected the polarising impact of Britain's longest-serving post-war prime minister. Queen Elizabeth II led mourners from the British establishment and 170 countries in bidding farewell to the Iron Lady, who transformed Britain and is credited with helping end the Cold War. Tens of thousands of people gathered to watch the procession through London to St Paul's Cathedral and many broke into spontaneous applause and threw flowers as the coffin passed by.

In a former colliery village in northern England, ex-miners still bitter about the 1980s coal pit closures under Margaret Thatcher's government celebrated her funeral on Wednesday by torching her effigy. The demonstrators paraded the effigy of Britain's deeply divisive first woman premier through the streets of Goldthorpe in a mock coffin before setting it ablaze on a makeshift pyre of wooden pallets and a sofa.

By Tom Bill LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's sluggish economy and the growth of online shopping has killed the space race among British supermarkets, leaving Tesco sitting on over 100 unwanted sites it could take a long time to sell, property experts said.