Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead!

Come on there's plenty who've been rehearsing that line for thirty years or more.

This morning former British Prime Minister Margaret Baroness Thatcher died aged 87 of a stroke at the Ritz hotel in central London. In death Margaret Thatcher is proving to every bit as controversial and divisive as she was in life.

As the UK's first and only female Prime Minister Thatcher's mere election in 1979 was ground breaking and controversial. Almost immediately she began something of a personal crusade against the UK and it's political and social status quo. This began with the introduction of an economic policy known as monetarism. Prior to this all economies had striven for full employment. The ideology of monetarism instead espoused that a percentage of the population should be kept unemployed as a way to control inflation. In the long term this policy has created an underclass of British families in which nobody has held a job for generations. This underclass has recently been forced into the spotlight through the current reforms to the welfare system and the case of the Philpott fire. In the immediate term this cause unemployment in the UK to sky-rocket leading to some of the worst social unrest since the 1920's with mass rioting taking place in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and London throughout 1980/81. During the early days of Thatcher's premiership this contributed to sense that the UK was at the brink of all out civil war - a feeling that never really went way with further waves of rioting across Britain in 1985/86.

Having imposed the policy of monetarism on the UK went on to challenge the power of the trade union movement introducing increasingly tougher regulations on trade union membership and the right to strike. Matters came to a head during the 1984/85 miners strike in which the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) embarked on a 12 month strike against mine closures and cuts to government subsidies. Following months of pitched battles between an increasingly para-military police force and striking miners that left many dead the NUM were finally defeated and the British coal mining industry was all but closed down destroying many of the communities that had built up around the industry over centuries.

Thatcher went on to take the same hard line she did with the miners against the Republican movement in Northern Ireland. For example she allowed British intelligence services (MI5) to supply weapons and training to Loyalist terror groups, allowed the British armed forces to carry out a shoot to kill policy of suspected Republican terrorists (extra-judical killing) and watched 10 Republican hunger strikers die in 1981 while passing laws preventing any giving voice to the Republican cause. As a result the Irish Republican Army (IRA) tried to kill her and her colleagues on numerous occasions most notably in the 1984 Brighton bombing.

Thatcher's combative approach was not limited to UK politics. Throughout the late 1980's her battles with the European Union (EU) over things like the Maastricht treaty and the UK's budget rebate delayed further European integration and the introduction of the single European currency for a good decade at least.

Thatcher's largest legacy though will probably her widespread policy of privatisation. This saw almost all of the UK's major state owned assets such as utility (Gas, Electricity, Water) companies sold off to private companies while assets like Britain's social housing stock was sold off to the people who lived in it through the right to buy scheme. Thatcher's most controversial efforts at privatisation came through her attempts to destroy the National Health Service (NHS) from within while de-regulating the private health care industry in an effort of force the UK into a US model of health care provision.

She finally went too far in 1989 when she attempted to privatise the electoral system itself through the poll tax/community charge which meant you had to pay a tax simply for the right to vote. This was largely proposed in an attempt to destroy the growing New Age Traveller/Rave scene that was becoming popular at the time. Fortunately the UK rose up almost as one and simply refused to pay the poll tax forcing the policy to be withdrawn and triggering Thatcher's own Conservative Party to force her out of office as she'd clearly gone a bit mad by that point. Saldy the Conservative Party did go on to take their revenge on the New Age Traveller/Rave scene through the 1994 Criminal Justice Act.

However Margaret Thatcher clearly did not win three general elections and in the process become the UK's longest serving Prime Minister without doing a few things right. I think one of these was the 1982 Falkland's war. While I don't want to get into the current arguments about the sovereignty of the Falklands/Malvinas I sure even many Argentines will agree that Leopoldo Galtieri who ordered the Argentine invasion was a nasty little fascist who deserved a smack in a mouth.

Thatcher's career long tough stance against Communism especially her fight against the trade unions who were being funded by the USSR in an effort to destabilise and destroy the UK meant that she played a key role in bringing about the end of the Cold War. This saved countless lives and issued in a era of unrivalled peace and prosperity while meaning the west no longer had to tolerate nasty little regimes such as Galtieri's Argentina, Pinochet's Chile or apartheid South Africa in order to counter-balance Soviet influence.

Thatcher's greatest achievement though was that she introduced choice into the UK. Prior to the 1980's Britain was a grim place to live where your future and life chances were set in stone almost from the moment you were born. So if you were born into a poor, working class area like Durham you would go to school until you were 13/14 before going to work in the same mine/factory that your parents did. You would then have children of your own who would do exactly the same thing while you died young. If you were born middle class you would go to a grammar school until you were 18 before getting a small job as a bank manager or a shop keeper like your parents did. If you were born upper-class you would go to a private school followed by university before going on to rule the country from a well paid position of power.

Thatcher changed all this by giving people the power to choose their own future. So while her economic reforms permanently destroyed large sections of Britain's industrial heartlands and her focus on the financial sector contributed to the current recession we're all experiencing for many more people with the talent and the drive to improve themselves Thatcher provided them with the opportunity.

As for the manner of her death while the re-emergence of all the issues she was synonymous with such as welfare reform, rising unemployment, NHS reform, the UK's relationship with Europe and even the Falkland islands could all be contributing factors the main one was that she was 87 years old and had been in poor physical health for the best part of a decade. So it was really a case of if she didn't die today she may well have died tomorrow.

16:25 on 8/5/13.