The Thatcher era was 20 years ago – get over it

IT MAY be a long time since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, but to some people it still seems like only yesterday. In the past week, the legacy, meaning and contemporary relevance of Mrs Thatcher, her reign and her era were thrown into sharp focus with the distasteful public discussion of whether she should have the honour and trappings of a state funeral.

Leaving aside the merits of a state funeral – there have been only nine for non-heads of state, including those of former prime ministers the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, Gladstone and Churchill – what the current debate has shown is how deep the divisions about Mrs Thatcher still run, despite the fact it is approaching 20 years since she was last in office.

Her opponents are apparently incensed that she should be considered for such an honour, and they generally still seem incandescent over the woman and her politics. Listening to Radio 4 last week and reading the Guardian's letters page, there was a potent mix of bitterness, an inability to see others' point of view and a stubborn refusal to move beyond events now descending into history.

Several people both on the radio and in the newspaper mentioned that they were looking forward to the great day when Mrs Thatcher died. Some planned parties; some planned trips the day of the funeral; others planned to play their old anti-Maggie rock songs – most popular being Elvis Costello's Tramp the Dirt Down.

The litany of the Left's complaints was predictable and filled with the usual crimes: the miners' strike, mass unemployment, increasing selfishness, "there is no such thing as society", the Falklands war, Liverpool being run by mindless Trots, and lots more.

It was a sad roll-call made more narrow and partisan by its inability to move beyond the 1980s – in the same way that right-wingers used to think that the country went to the dogs in the 1940s with collectivism, the welfare state and the NHS; and in the 1960s through "love and peace" and the decline in respect for authority. We used to think such right-wingers were either off their trolleys or just out of touch with the modern world.

Being a left-winger has become the exact mirror image of what it used to mean to be a right-winger in earlier times, railing against the norms of society – against young people, the condition of Britain, the media and much more.

For another thing, the list of Thatcher "war crimes" is very partial and selective, and does not include some of the things that were good about her era, including trade union reform, tax cuts, council house sales and a whole host of measures that liberalised and liberated people.

Don't take my word for it. Go to areas such as Glasgow East, which used to be filled with Stalinist levels of council housing; in some parts, it is now possible to walk past row upon row of former council houses – transformed, cared for and loved – not the product of some selfish financial calculus, as some would argue, but of people's desire to own and have a sense of their own worth.

It is also true that Mrs Thatcher gave left-wingers a sense of certainty and something to rail against that they have never had since she left office. She also bequeathed a fantastic soundtrack of anti-Thatcher and anti-Tory songs, ranging from the Specials' Ghost Town to The The's Heartland and an entire Pink Floyd album, The Final Cut: A Requiem for the Post-war Dream. The end of Thatcher signalled the end of this kind of leftism and such political music in the hit parade.

The left-wing view of Thatcher also ignores the fact that, for all the awful things they can list that she did, a much longer list could be drawn up by the same people for Blair. Yes, it is true that Blair is the "son of Thatcher" who could not have happened without her, but to many on the Left he was the ultimate betrayal and denial of left-wing hopes by making the Labour Party safe from socialism.

This hints at a wider reason for the bitterness against Thatcher. Left-wing criticism of her feels contemporary and current – ie, about the here and now, rather than the past – because Thatcher's ideas and values, for all their limitations, became ascendant and triumphed. The leftist rage against Thatcher is a rage of impotence about the way things are today.

Many of today's lefties are the grumpy old men and women who see the entire country going to the dogs, who see Thatcher and Blair as the personifications of this and who propose nothing positive but instead offer an endless list of complaints.

Such people, if last week's media is any guide, seem to be quite large in number and representative of a slice of left-wing and supposedly "liberal" opinion. They have a complete lack of self-awareness of how unattractive and unappealing their world-view is.

They insist on growing older, greyer and more bitter, refusing to let go of the 1980s and continuing to clutch their Elvis Costello and Morrissey songs, which I always found distasteful, even in the 1980s. Imagine the Left's fury and indignation towards a "Mandela on the Guillotine"!

Many left-wingers now seem to embrace happily the politics of symbolism and gesture, rather than substance. So they invoke their anger at the proposals for Mrs Thatcher's state funeral, rather than engage in a serious debate about how we organise our public services, tackle generational poverty and widen opportunity in a society where social mobility has closed down.

Leftists have to get past their rage towards Mrs Thatcher, stop living in a parallel universe where somehow the revolution worked out and the good guys were victorious, and recognise that, in many ways, she won.

The issue is not whether Thatcher has her state funeral or not, but recognising that her political revolution transformed Britain, and realising that the challenge is to have the imagination and daring to begin a genuine post-Thatcher agenda, which deals with the Britain she created for good and bad.