Let's blame the parents

Yesterday marked 25 years since Margaret Thatcher came to power, and it struck her supporters - bizarrely unembarrassed as they are - that this was as good a time as any to muse over her many achievements. There was talk of her "restructuring the economy", something to which Simon Heffer rather extravagantly ascribes the subsequent liberation of eastern Europe from the "Soviet yoke". Words like "restructuring" give me a bad feeling. As vital as the activity sounds, when absolutely everyone seems to do it, you do have to wonder whether it isn't just a natural function of government.

There was the regulatory guff about smashing the power of the unions, but let's be clear - we've all seen Brassed Off and Billy Elliot. The spectre of strikes may have tickled the right responses from the Callaghan generation, but these days, we're all on the side of the shamefully badly treated miners who could also play the trombone, and the tiny boy-dancers who withstood accusations of gayness in order to do more ballet.

The most important legacy of this woman has very little to do with anything so concrete as a policy. Twenty years from now, no one will be able to remember which ones were started by Thatcher and which by Blair, anyway. And the rather nebulous claims for Thatcher's feminism are really predicated on her having possessed the physical attributes of the female. Not what you'd want carved on your headstone, is it? "She advanced the cause of women by having two breasts!"

But she created one thing on which we all broadly concur - Thatcher's children. This generation originated because her time in office was relatively long and it struck us all as unusual and noteworthy that there would be people, by the mid-1990s, who wouldn't be able to remember any government but hers.

Unless you were preternaturally interested in politics as a nine-year-old, you probably count as a Thatcher's child if you were born at any point after 1970. It's not an exact science, specifying how old you have to be to be influenced by a political climate, but let's say that everyone now of voting age and under 33 is a child of Thatcher. We don't have an enormously good reputation, since it's loosely based on the rather atavistic philosophy of our metaphorical progenitor - we are greedy, selfish, buy-to-let, dog-eat-dog, hopelessly short-sighted, amoral hellbeasts, in other words, who see no point in society unless we can scam it or sue it.

Two weeks ago, Pat Lerew, head of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, vented this view rather baldly: "Today's parents were growing up in the 1980s, Thatcher's children, when there was no such thing as society and it was everyone for themselves, when anything that had a monetary value was sold and anything that had no monetary value was therefore of no value ... Small wonder then that the children of the day grew up with attitudes that have manifested themselves in their own children." She stops short of delineating exactly how those attitudes manifest in an eight-year-old, but I think we can safely assume, not very nicely.

This claim, and the many others like it in constant circulation, are rather extraordinary. The implicit suggestion is that to have grown up under a programme of privatisation, one must necessarily have imbibed the values underpinning it, and will therefore be sullied for ever more. Now, first, it wasn't us voting for this woman - it was our parents. So if anyone should be sullied by the culture she created, it should surely be the people who gave her mandate to create it.

Second, the idea rests on the fiction that the prime minister will have more - or even as much - influence on young minds as their teachers will. Teachers, apart from PE ones, tend to be leftwing, even more so then, when they were working under a government hell bent on persuading them how worthless they were. We all spend our formative waking hours with teachers - they loom incredibly large on our consciousness. The very idea that their views could be of less import, in the long run, than the privatisation of British Rail is absurd.

Third, there was a much fiercer culture of leftwing polemic in the 80s and early 90s, where alternative comedians really wouldn't be at all ashamed to talk passionately about "society" and nobody would feel embarrassed to rock against racism. Why didn't we imbibe any of that? Were we honestly reading Hansard instead of watching telly? Like any cliche, the phrase long ceased to be objectionable - but I think it's time we did object. Still use it, by all means. But bear in mind that the real blame, for anything Thatcher-based, lies not with Thatcher's children but with Thatcher's adults.