Handling Thatcher's legacy shall prove difficult

My mother always said it is bad to talk as if someone was already dead. So, I shall have to do some apologising whilst I'm home this weekend.

It's not entirely my fault though. The Observer's Tim Adam's revisionist analysis of Margaret Thatcher touches upon many of these themes.

Undoubtedly, over thirty years since the idea of 'Thatcherism' first emerged, her legacy continues to bitterly divide opinion. Speak to many, and she remains the milk snatcher, the mine destroyer and the originator of 'that' phrase, 'there is no such thing as society'. Of course, many would also challenge this. Without Thatcher, the arguments shall undoubtedly go, we would never have enjoyed the flourishing economic system of the late 1990s.

Incidentally, they also lay the blame for the current economic crisis at Gordon's door, rather than that of Margaret.

The overtones of the current economic crisis has brought into sharp focus the conditions of Thatcher's Britain once again. Massive inequalities have again been highlighted. Indeed, it was this week that Save the Children launched their first ever UK appeal for better food standards for children.

Much the same themes can be seen in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, set during the 1980s.

It is interesting then to see the likes of Andrea Riseborough's The Long Walk to Finchley attract such popular attention. Have our perceptions towards Thatcher really changed?

It was Tony Blair, in 1998, that famously said that we were now all middle-class. I suspect the economic downturn has changed such perceptions. I wonder as well if it has really changed perceptions of capitalism. Sarkosy certainly tried to make it so last week during the G20 meetings but this attempt was largely regarded as a failure, only safe-guarding limited attempts to change the 'Anglo-American' model.

So, today observers call into question once again the system which Thatcher fought so hard against. Undoubtedly Keynesian economics is once again on the march.

Whether voters shall stick with such Keynesian ideas of big government remains another question.

Incidentally, this was originally intended for publication last week - we've not paid the electric bill this month...