NOW and then, discussions arise about Margaret Thatcher. I am always amused to read the views of people who were not around at the time of her election in 1979. Obviously, it doesn’t stop you from having an opinion about her — but you would have to be at least 62 years old to have been old enough to vote for her in 1979.

I was around at that time on the left of the Labour Party. I was first elected as a councillor at Leeds in the middle of her assault on the mining communities and I was the council leader who was forced to bring in her detested poll tax. I was there when the poll tax was repealed.

At the finish, she couldn’t even win the votes of her own cabinet who removed her in the brutal way in which the Tories excel when they want to put an end to their leaders.

Thatcher’s domestic policies consisted of a war against not only the manufacturing industry and of course coal mining, but also the north of England, and the poor.

She issued into Britain the economic domination of the country by the City financiers and market triumphalism at the expense of the social fabric, which she despised: “There is no such thing as society,” she infamously said.

You don’t have to have been around at the time. The information is all there online. Here are some facts about her so-called “achievements” which you can find at the click of a button.

In 1979, just before her election, one in 20 working-age adults was unemployed. By 1984 the figure had more than doubled, up to more than one in nine.

What Thatcher did then was to attempt to hide the numbers by moving people off the dole queue and onto long-term disability benefits. In 1979 there were 772,000 people classified as permanently sick. By the time we got to 1991, there were 1.6 million.

This policy has had lasting consequences. I know many heroic older miners who stayed on strike for a year. Their pit was then closed and they were put on the dole. When they went to the employment exchange, as it was then called, the staff would say that there was no chance of work and so in order to avoid having to sign on to the dole weekly, why not go onto long-term invalidity benefits?

So blatant and so shameful was this process that even George Osborne — the architect of so much devastation via his austerity policies — went on to denounce Thatcher.

As chancellor in 2013, he said: “Governments of all colours let too many unemployed people get parked on disability benefits, and told they’d never work again. Why? Because people on disability benefits don’t get counted in unemployment figures that could embarrass politicians. It was quick-fix politics of the worst kind.”

The Thatcher government effectively destroyed much of Britain’s manufacturing base. In 1979, 7.1 million people in Britain were employed in the manufacturing sector, by the end of her premiership this had fallen to 4.5 million.

The deindustrialisation was brutal. It left whole communities lost and bewildered. Across the north of England, there were nearly a million manufacturing jobs lost in 12 years. A further 600,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in the Midlands in the same period.

Millions of people fell into poverty. But they didn’t just “fall.” They were pushed.

Take the pensioners. Many had gone to war. They saw it as their patriotic duty. Others had worked for the country over decades helping to create the wealth of the nation.

Their proven loyalty didn’t stop Thatcher. She pushed an additional two million pensioners into poverty during her time in office. There were nearly 10 million pensioners in poverty by 1991. Child poverty rose too.

Before Labour left office in 1979, 12 per cent of our people were in poverty. After 11 years she had raised this to 16.7 percent.

Not everyone suffered the government’s slings and arrows. She put rocket boosters under the rich and the big corporations. The Financial Times index showed the top 30 companies’ wealth increased six-fold. And in the three years from 1987, the income of corporations grew by nearly £30 billion.

In the meantime, the richest weren’t doing too badly either. In the twenty years up to 1990, the richest 10 per cent who had been receiving £1 in every £4, were now earning £1 in every £3.

The idea, however, that if you enrich the already wealthy then their cash will somehow trickle down to the rest of us, has been proven to be utter nonsense.

One thing, though, is important to consider when we reflect on the Thatcher legacy. It is perfectly true that she broke through the post-war consensus which was sinking as British capitalism was going through one of its chronic periods of crisis. Then as now, we needed to change direction.

The whole post-Thatcher settlement is long past its sell-by date. We need a clean break with a system which is leaving Britain in a divided and broken state after 13 years of Tory rule.

We need to be clear, however, that the Thatcher assault on the post-war settlement was done in favour of the rich and powerful. Britain needs to turn away from all of this.

So here is the lesson we can learn from Thatcher. During her rule, we used to say to each other “We need a Labour government which will look after our class in the same way that Thatcher looks after hers.” How true that was then and how true it is now.

Jon Trickett is Labour MP for Hemsworth.