For those of us in our sixties, it's sometimes hard to remember that anyone younger than that almost certainly has no memories of Margaret Thatcher, the vicious and corrosive effect she had on British society and the special and undying loathing for her which is still nurtured by those of us who were there.
Some commentators say that she was a necessary evil to curb the runaway power of unions in the 1970s.
Unions needed modernising and moderating, not crushing into dust. The result of Thatcher's prolonged assault on them was to leave the workforce less empowered and more exploited than at any time since the end of the 19th Century.
Thatcher did more than any other human in history to destroy the idea that people should take care of each other as well as looking out for Number One. She was by a country mile the most socially divisive Prime Minister this country ever had. The miner's strike and poll tax alone tore the population into two bitterly-opposed halves and caused more violent unrest on the streets than at any other time in British history.
She led, and created the environment that caused, the most corrupt, sleaze-ridden government the UK has ever seen. Anyone still remember Westland?
She was at the forefront of the privatisation policy that has left our railways - once the envy of the world - a laughing stock, and caused countless other disasters which we're still paying to try to clean up.
She caused the death of hundreds of British soldiers and thousands of Argentinian conscripts by deliberately allowing the conflict over the Falklands to escalate into a war, for her own political benefit.
Her policies caused the highest unemployment in this country's history, throwing 3 million out of work and into poverty and misery - at a rate which exceeded even the general recession - and brought about the fastest acceleration in the gap between rich and poor recorded under any UK government. (These two facts are related both as cause AND effect.)
She almost single-handedly destroyed Britain as an industrial manufacturing economy, replacing those jobs with low-paid, no-security service industry work.
She poisoned national relations with the rest of Europe.
She presided over and/or directly created, some of the most disastrous boom-bust economics of modern history. Some of us still remember when mortgage interest rates rocketed to 16% under the party that was supposed to represent the safe financial hand.
With regard to her ambition to curb inflation, she presided over a doubling of inflation between 1979 and 1980, from around 10 to over 20 per cent, and a return to 'double-digit' inflation by the end of the 1980's.
She effectively destroyed BOTH of Britain's main political parties, and with them democracy as a tool of choice. Labour had to turn into 'Tory Lite' in order to get elected, destroying the socialist side of the divide (to be fair, Blair holds considerable responsibility here too, as the party of Kinnock and Smith looked likely to finally get elected while still holding onto most of its socialist principles).
The Tories, their ground stolen, were left with nowhere to go, an ineffectual, irrelevant squabbling rump. Britain is now and for the forseeable future a de facto one-party state, with opposition so weak as to be useless. For a woman who preached choice and strength, that's a pretty ironic legacy.
On leaving Downing St, Thatcher bequeathed to Britain "high inflation, rising interest rates, unemployment and a Tory Party tarnished by allegations of sexual and financial wrongdoing". Who says so? John Major, her own successor. Source: The Spectator, Aug 2001
