Ding Dong, the wicked witch...

The death of Margaret Thatcher on April 8 was less significant than my choice of breakfast cereal that morning. But as the days went on I did get really annoyed with the massive coverage given to her by the media and, especially, the ridiculous interest in her funeral. Radio 4, at least, should have known better than to cancel scheduled programmes to broadcast the sorry affair.

And I feel duty bound to comment on a person who blighted an entire decade during which some of the few useful things a state can do (e.g. supplying housing, energy, and water) were systematically dismantled and its residents were exposed to financial exploitations hitherto undreamed of by sharks in the guise of bankers, insurers, solicitors, and other professions not even invented yet. And countless productive jobs were replaced by countless telesales and vending jobs devoid of any sort of job satisfaction or value to society.

No need for any statue or memorial! Every time you are accosted by some (otherwise unemployed) salesperson for a power company, every time you are cold-called by some desperate call centre operative, every time you can't get a mortgage because the mutual building societies, created to help people to buy their homes, have mostly been turned into a profit-centric banks ...you know who is responsible. (In short the term 'professional' came to mean not pride in ones specialist skills and in applying them ethically, but simply a passport to making loadsa money any which way you could.)

Glenda Jackson summed up what, under Thatcherism changed from vices to virtues: "greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees". It doesn't even matter if Thatcher herself did not utter these sentiments. This is the truth that occurred, and as a direct result of her policies.We are left with the kind of society where someone thinks it's OK to flog fake bomb detectors for £10,000 to countries where they are relied upon to save lives.

In a real sense, the fact that in 2013 the people who do really useful work (carers, council workers) are treated like shit while those who don't produce or provide anything but simply move money around (bankers, brokers, traders) get fantastically rich while the rest of us pay for their cock-ups is down to Thatcherism, or at least to a particular brand of Tory dogma.

Paradoxically Thatcher inspired some supreme moments of humour: the wonderful Spitting Image TV show for example, and on our (1970?) carnival-atmosphere student demo in Sheffield against what seemed, then, an outlandish plan to replace student grants with loans.

(Among the chants were "Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher" because of her ceasing the provision of free milk to schools, the hardy perennial "Thatcher OUT! Thatcher OUT!, Thatcher OUT! OUT! OUT!, and the hilarious chant that could only have been instigated by a sharp history student: "Disestablishment of the Church of England - IN!, "Disestablishment of the Church of England - IN!", "Disestablishment of the Church of England - IN!, IN!, IN!").

So I was not one of those mourning the demise of Mrs T. Neither will I mourn the death of Tony Blair. Though I very much hope he takes his leave before I do.