Apparently I should not be disrespectful of Margaret Thatcher now that she has died, so I thought might instead share a few of my personal memories of her years in power and her immediate legacy:

• the removal of the educational grants system and its replacement by student loans
• three million unemployed, and the tories ever-changing definition of the word “unemployed”
• the miners’ strike and communities split apart on NUM / UDM lines
• the destruction of the British coal industry
• the destruction of the British steel industry
• the destruction of the British automotive industry
• North Sea oil revenues squandered to prop up the balance of payments
• Black Monday 1987
• Poll Tax riots
• my home town Mansfield becoming a ghost town after pit closures
• Coventry becoming a ghost town after car factory closures
• a Spitting Image sketch in which Thatcher berates Lawson, “I said phase out the Pound note, not the Pound Sterling!”
• spending nine months on the dole after I graduated – they say 30% of graduates landed jobs within 6 months of graduation that year
• living in a bedsit on £44.75 dole and £36 housing benefit a week, despite having just earned a BA (Hons)
• having to leave the UK to get a job

Other people no doubt have other memories of her years in power. Mine are enough for me to see no good reason to respect her, alive or dead. I expect to be thoroughly sickened over the next few days by all the hagiographic crap that will be spouted via every media. Death does not make saints of sinners. When you see people praising Thatcher, take note of who they are – they’re the ones who benefited from her economic policies, and are still doing so. The rest of us, we just had to live with the damage she inflicted.