No one who didn't live through the seventies can imagine what it was like

I scowled, but I understood the emotions, even if I disagreed with the sentiment – few deaths, let alone those of an elected political leader, should be celebrated.

He is young, far too young to remember well the eighties, let alone to have lived through the turmoil that was Britain in the seventies.

I did and can.

In fact, my memories of my formative teenage years when Britain earned the nickname of the ‘Sickman of Europe’ are not of turmoil as such. They were just the times I had always known – grey buildings, grey strikes, grey people, grey lives.

No one who did not grow up in such times, walk through the graffiti-strewn neglected town centres, inhabit the concrete hell of failed fifties and sixties housing projects, and survive the weekly gang violence that passed for football support, could possibly begin to understand what those years were like.

The TUC Conference was broadcast live on TV, adults fretted over whether the Chancellor would put a couple of pennies on beer and petrol, and no one I knew could afford a foreign holiday.

The cars we drove were appalling, especially those made in Britain. British Leyland was a joke, Saturday afternoon sports programmes were dominated by wrestling – the old-fashioned unglamorous kind where fat blokes sweated around a ring rather than today’s Greek Gods in flowing hair and Lycra leggings – and cross country running was looked on as a national sport.

A Vesta Chow Mien was considered the height of sophistication, Saturday Night Fever was about as saucy as it got at the cinema (I tried and failed to sneak into Emmanuel), and to spice up our lives they showed Billy Smart’s Circus and Disney Time on TV every bank holiday in case we felt hard done to.

Looking back it was grim. When the eighties arrived and punk was followed by New Romantics and there was no one to tell you where to stand in line any more to get what life your birth had dictated for you, it was as if the clouds had parted and the sun finally shone through.

I was living in the Midlands and business was booming, industrial output increased and, although the danger signs were there of the free market that would see jobs take flight to cheap foreign labour, for a time the atmosphere was heady.

I didn’t know why the coal mines needed to close. I couldn’t see why we had to buy cheap coal from Poland at the expense of British jobs. But my parents, both from the backstreets of Birmingham and the school of hard knocks, said the miners had only themselves to blame for having put the country through the misery of three-day weeks and freezing power cuts. They still keep a box of candles in a kitchen cupboard today just in case.

I did know I would not have wanted to work down a pit for forty years, tradition or not, so my sympathy with communities facing the destruction of their way of life was tempered with a suspicion many of the young men who would now be unable to follow their fathers and brothers underground might live to welcome such change. How many living in those former mining communities would today truly exchange their lives for one at the coalface? Not many probably.

That the nation could have done more to help communities ravaged by the changes in the Thatcher years is a truth. With hindsight far more could have been done. But would any amount of welfare provision, re-training and job creation projects have avoided the bitter clashes with the unions? I somehow doubt that. What we witnessed then was the death roar of proud traditional industries that were to be swept away, not just in Britain but across the western world as change blew through. Inevitable? I believe so. If not then, if Britain had not been in the vanguard, then afterwards for certain, learning from others’ mistakes perhaps, but heading for the same horizon.

Change then was just as unstoppable as preventing the rise of India and China’s economic might is today. Those who attack Mrs T today – many of them it seems not even born when she was in power – seem conveniently to forget she was voted in three times, hardly the actions of people who were, the current headlines in some papers scream, a divided nation. And even if that were true, tell me when we have not been divided? At what point during our rose-coloured view of the last century were the people of Britain united behind one side of the political spectrum? The answer is never. To say Mrs T was responsible for dividing the nation is as absurd as saying the class system never existed until David Cameron became Prime Minister. Enough has been remarked on already concerning the overt sexism in the tone and language of attacks on Mrs Thatcher that undoubtedly would never have been used to define her character if she had been male. The irony of so-called champions of equality using such terminology as “witch” and “bitch” is no doubt lost on many of them. They blame the whole history of the world on her – literally in the case of Ken Livingston – since the eighties, an absurdity.

Was she solely responsible for all that was to follow? The good and the bad? Of course not. One politician does not change society. All great leaders – and she was great, no matter what side of the divide you come down on – require the support and strength of many to push through their ideas: her cabinets, her party, the millions who voted for her in three elections. Britain was as hungry for change then as it is today, with many of the same challenges: welfare, industry, commerce, Europe, a place in the world.

As then, there is disagreement on how these issues are best to be tackled. We wait to see if a strong leader will emerge to forge a way ahead with enough conviction to take the majority of the country with them on the journey. Change is like that. Some relish it, some hate what they know and understand being swept away.