Thirty-five years ago this week, Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street in a blaze of political glory.
That’s when all our troubles began.
On the footsteps of Number 10, she paraded herself as a latter-day St Francis of Assisi, promising: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony… where there is despair, may we bring hope.”
She went on to do precisely the opposite, driving unemployment above three million and dividing the nation with economic policies that led to recession.
For most working people, especially in the North of England, nothing has really changed for the better.
And if Thatcher’s public-school heirs have anything to do with it, nothing will.
The Tory obsession with privatisation is unabated. She flogged off gas, water and electricity.
John Major sold the coal industry and the railways.
Cameron undersold Royal Mail and is privatising the NHS and public services as fast as he can.
She unleashed giant greed by deregulating the City and the current generation of bankers drove the nation to the brink of collapse.
Cameron and Osborne perpetuate her slavish devotion to “markets” and spivs, rejecting taxes on bank bonuses and a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions across Europe to pay for the bankers’ criminal avarice.
And where has this Thatcherism-in- Bullingdon-tights got us?
A new Eurostat survey this week revealed that the people of Cornwall and the Welsh Valleys are worse off than Poles, Lithuanians and Hungarians.
Families in West Wales and the Valleys are only half as wealthy as those in Germany.
And folk in Durham and Lincolnshire fare little better, with the same living standard as Estonians and Polish peasants.
Eight areas of the UK, including Lancashire, Leicestershire and Staffs, are poorer than any region in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria – and Ireland!
This is the legacy of 35 years of Thatcherism, carried forward by her bastard political children.
Nor have attitudes changed since that fateful day in 1979.
Tory candidate Carl Husted, standing for election to the council in Wolverhampton, this week described local people as “scum” who should be abandoned to kill one another.
I remember despairing jobless lads throwing themselves off the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle at the height of Mrs T’s reign.
She abandoned them, and they killed themselves.
She died last year, a rich old woman loaded with honours, in a private suite in the Ritz Hotel, London.
That’s the way it is with the Tories.