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No, I’m not celebrating. I loathed her, but I don’t wish anybody dead. I’m not mourning, though.  

Margaret Thatcher did more than any other politician in the history of this country to hurt and to divide.

She will be remembered as a figure who was adored by the haves, by the sort of people who believe it right that her pea-brained heir George Osborne should this week have stood on the graves of six dead children and used their terrible fate to peddle his bullying, cowardly politics – the peevish, petty-minded politics of selfishness she created.

By everybody else she will be remembered as a figure who was truly hated – by people who valued the generous, sharing, caring state we had created from the wreckage of war, by people who believed that pulling together for the benefit of all was better than the nauseating spectacle of private greed and selfishness legitimised by Thatcher.

She used the machinery of the state to crush people at home and abroad and created half a country’s worth of economic wasteland.

She stole our phones, our railways, our buses, our oil, our power, even the water that wept from the sky. The woman described as a great patriot sold off this country’s infrastructure to a ramshackle assortment of businessmen from all over the world who had only one thing in common – they cared a damned sight more for their dividends than they did for Britain.

She believed that people had the right to increase their wealth – but only as long as those people were not miners or trade unionists or pacifists.

Everybody should strive for the best for their family, she decreed – so long as they didn’t do so by requesting a job, or a pay rise from their wealthy employers.

Britons should fight for freedom, she told us as she led us into a war – but not if the freedom they were fighting for was the right to work, or the right to have their own elected city council, or the right to be gay.

In the prosperous south, some people loved Thatcher. But listen to the words, today, of 70-year-old retired Durham miner David Hopper, who perfectly summed up what she meant to the rest of the country and encapsulated the divisiveness she created:

“There’s no sympathy from me, for what she did to our community. She destroyed our community, our villages and our people.

“Our children have got no jobs and the community is full of problems. There’s no work and no money and it’s very sad the legacy she has left behind. She absolutely hated working people and I have got very bitter memories of what she did. The violence that was meted out on us was terrible.

“I would say to those people who want to mourn her that they’re lucky she did not treat them like she treated us.”

Indeed they were: Thatcher was a god to those with jobs, money and homes who could see a few more quid in their pockets thanks to her – to all those, like her, who believed in the individual rather than in society. To the rest, to decent people, to people who cared for the common good, for the economic well-being of the country, for the provision of opportunity to all, for social justice – for all of those good people, she was the devil incarnate.

What people who rejected Thatcher wanted to celebrate was not her death, but justice: we really wanted to see some sort of retribution visited upon her for her crimes against society. That justice is now half done – the voices of half this disunited kingdom today are eloquent testimony to the truth that she will be held in utter contempt by historians. Her’s will forever be a legacy that was , economically, asset-strippingly short-termist to the nth and most damaging degree, morally bankrupt, intellectually empty.

However, the iron lady’s iron grip on the London media is absolute even in death, and today the trite clichés, such as “she put the great back into Britain” and “she took on the unions” and “she mended a broken country”, were being parroted.

Hmm. Ask anybody who used to work in manufacturing whether she put the great back into Britain. How much of a manufacturing base do we have today, post-Thatcher? Ask any non-union employee today whether they feel secure in their job, whether they feel well rewarded, whether they feel they share in the wealth they generate. Ask the economic powerhouses of the world – Germany, the United States, now China – whether they think Britain is “mended”.

You need only look at the reaction to her death to see how divisive she remains – a Facebook campaign to make Ding Dong The Witch is Dead the number one single (yes, I’ve downloaded it); a Twitter campaign, #nostatefuneralforthatcher; 2,500 likes a minute on the Facebook page of the website isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk (‘YES’, read its homepage); less than an hour after her death, the publication of a book called Thatcher Tributes, which, say its publishers, is an “expression of the feelings of ordinary people who will greet the death of Mrs Thatcher with very little regret.”

In the village shop Elvis Costello’s Tramp the Dirt Down was being played to mark her passing (it was Costello who also wrote Shipbuilding, as poignant a damnation of the woman that ever existed); my phone’s been ringing with voices saying “have you heard?”. There have been sick jokes, of course, but mainly it’s been quite solemn. Her passing has made me, for one, think of her victims.  

One day the good Captain Kay and I will surely fulfil a promise we made long ago, at the height of her brutal reign: we will dance on her grave. Because her legacy is a legacy of selfishness and hate, of brutality and violence, of consumption and greed, of lives destroyed. She brought – or gave away – riches to the few, but to the many she brought misery. To some, she even brought death – to starving Argentinian conscripts, to the victims of her international arms deals.

Today is a day for the Daily Mail readers to mourn; for the rest of us, it is a day to reflect on a sordid, confrontational era that sullied the history of a nation that once stood for right against might, for good against greed.

Today should remind us that the heirs of Thatcher are to this day doing what George Osborne did, standing on the graves of those poor children: doing anything, absolutely anything, to protect their money and status, and the money and status of their friends, no matter what the cost to the rest of society.

Riches for the few at the cost of the many. Thatcher’s was the era in which, statistically, and for the first time since the war, the rich really did get richer and the poor really did get poorer. Ultimately, that’s what Thatcher stood for. It’s not an epitaph I, or anybody I love, would choose.