Why we should feel shame that Lady t hasn't had the honour she deserves

A magnificent bronze statue of Lady Thatcher was unveiled last night on a hitherto empty plinth in the Members' Lobby of the House of Commons. She will look across for the rest of time, or at any rate for as long as there is a Parliament at Westminster, towards the statue of another great British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.

One particular person was absent from the ceremony: Tony Blair. The Prime Minister has made clear his admiration for Lady Thatcher — has, indeed, traded on it as a way of working his way into the hearts of Middle England. Yet he could not be bothered to turn up on the night. Could it be that he could not bear to be reminded, as the moment of his own departure approaches, that his own legacy is incomparably slighter than Lady Thatcher's?

Earlier in the day, he had announced the scaling down of the British military presence in Iraq — a symbolic moment if there ever was one. According to one of his former advisers speaking in the first part of Michael's Cockerell's three-part TV series shown on Tuesday evening, Mr Blair was obsessed with his legacy even during his first term of office. What would he leave behind?

Mission

Iraq, Iraq and Iraq. The withdrawal of British soldiers from the south of the country is no doubt intended by Mr Blair to suggest that his mission, which began with the invasion in 2003, is now fulfilled. Others will see it as cutting and running, a case of leaving the Iraqis, and maybe the Americans, to sort out the mess we helped to start. It marks, at any rate, the first occasion on which he has acted independently of his master, President George Bush.

Tony Blair, the man obsessed with his legacy, does not leave much of a legacy behind. Northern Ireland, perhaps, though John Major, who started the 'peace process', should be given at least as much credit for that. Mr Blair might also lay claim to a decade of buoyant economic growth, though Gordon Brown was its architect, building on the legacy which the Tories passed on, and for which Thatcherism had laid the groundwork. We come back to Iraq: it obliterates Mr Blair's modest achievements. It is his legacy.

He should have attended the unveiling last night. It was wrong and mean-spirited of him to plead another engagement, and stay away. Somehow his lack of generosity speaks for us all — or for those of us who refuse to acknowledge the heroic role that Margaret Thatcher played in rescuing this country from decline and depression and hopelessness.

I am not thinking of the Labour Left, which will never be reconciled to Thatcherism. I am not even thinking of those members of working-class communities in the North and Wales and Scotland who see themselves as victims of the war on inefficient and bloated nationalised industries, and unfettered trades union power, which Lady Thatcher unleashed. Some of them were victims, and I don't expect to see them celebrate the woman whom they regard as a butcher.

It is the rest of us who should feel ashamed — the millions who have been beneficiaries of the economic revolution that Lady Thatcher — opposed initially by many even in her own party and Cabinet — brought about. Some are too young, in our amnesiac society, to know what they owe to her. We do not remember — or we have forgotten — what Britain was like in the Seventies.

Inflation over 20 per cent in some years; trades union power dominant; the stockmarket flat for many years; strikes everywhere; above all, despair. Britain really was a joke, and when one went abroad, in America or on the Continent, people would come up to express their sympathy. The idea of relentless economic decline was stamped into our national psyche. Many so-called intellectuals said that the only realistic objective of government was to 'manage decline'.

Margaret Thatcher rescued us from much of this. She took on the over-mighty trades unions and faced down the striking miners. She privatised many ludicrously inefficient nationalised industries that were run solely for the benefit of their employees. She liberalised foreign exchange restrictions, and slashed income tax, so that almost for the first time since the war, entrepreneurs sprang up, and hard work and enterprise were rewarded. In the City, she presided over 'Big Bang,' as a result of which London is now overtaking New York — an inconceivable prospect 25 years ago — as the world's foremost financial centre.

And for all the shocks that were felt by some working-class communities, particularly in the early years, there were millions of other working people who were liberated by the economic policies of Thatcherism, and who found new opportunities they had never dreamed of under previous socialist administrations which had claimed to speak for them. The single biggest boon for many of these people was the right to buy their own council houses, a measure bitterly resisted by Labour. It was the Labour Party which wanted to keep these people in its thrall.