How did we ever let it come to this? Margaret Thatcher had barely drawn her last breath before the outpouring of extremism and vitriol began and it was deeply unpleasant to behold. Has Britain forgotten how to show decorum and respect when a towering public figure dies? Sickeningly, within minutes of the announcement of her demise, she was being hailed as The Woman Who Saved Britain. It was a cruel and barbaric distortion that must have embarrassed even the most devoted of her admirers. In the circumstances, and with her body still warm, it merely removed dignity from the occasion and appealed to the lowest common denominator of the right wing. Those who demurred at such a grotesque epithet were being howled down and denounced in the most beastly terms. As this momentous week wore on it was to get worse.

Before long, the BBC found itself under siege for refusing to reduce its reporting of Mrs Thatcher's death to bland hagiography. How dare it attempt to display an even-handed sense of proportion during all the ballyhoo and reactionary malarkey? Why, some of its reporters, in their intemperate rush to keep the nation appraised of global reaction to the Iron Lady's death, had forgotten to don black ties. Have they no respect? George Alagiah, unconscionably, chose to wear a silvery grey confection. "He looked like a spiv, not someone who was charged with delivering the saddest news some of us have ever received," was one of the more printable sentiments of the on-line trolls.

The Queen can usually be relied upon to step back from all the nonsense and restore some equanimity and balance in situations that threaten to get out of hand. Not this time, though. In 1997, she admirably refused to abandon her Highland holiday to pay homage to a people's princess before the mob dragged her unceremoniously to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Her Majesty has obviously learned her lesson. This time, her office couldn't signal her intent to attend the funeral of the people's prime minister quickly enough. It is an honour she has refused to bestow on any other postwar premier save Churchill.

There is even a campaign afoot to accord Mrs Thatcher a state funeral and thus give her parity with old Winston. The scent of blood is in the flaring nostrils of Britain's mad right and no one is safe. Don't they know that their behaviour is besmirching the memory of a woman who preached temperance and probity in everything? "Where there is hatred, let me sow love." Even as innocent young people were gathering in town squares to toast Mrs Thatcher's death, as is their democratic right, police riot squads began to swoop. It is being whispered that martial law may be imposed to ensure that our former prime minister gets the send-off she deserves.

In Glasgow's George Square, admittedly ribald and haphazardly dressed revellers drank champagne and chanted: "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie: dead, dead, dead." It was a charming and whimsical ditty harking back to the halcyon days of the mid-80s when we all used to chant: "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie: out, out, out." Yet such has been the outpouring of rightwing bile and hatred across the country following Mrs Thatcher's death that many of those who gathered in the centre of Glasgow will be waiting, in some trepidation, for a knock on the door late at night.

In Glasgow, we are all looking on bemused as England is losing its head. It's no secret that we didn't like Mrs Thatcher, but it was nothing personal. For more than 100 years, this city has been the cradle of what radicalism has ever existed in the UK. Clydeside has resisted hundreds of little Thatchers and it will resist 100 more. Soon it will be the centenary of the Glasgow rent strike when another Iron Lady, Mary Barbour, resisted the greed of slum owners – the Thatcherites of their day – during the First World War.

With their men away fighting a needless war in which most would die, the slum owners took the opportunity to rack up the rents as other workers flocked to the city for jobs in the munitions industry. "Mrs Barbour's Army" repelled the advances of the sheriff's officers to evict those who couldn't pay the rent. Eventually, they won their case and the Rent Restriction Act was passed.

The Glasgow rent strike was one of several examples of working-class actions in the face of unfettered greed and government brutality that culminated in Bloody Friday, 31 January 1919. This was when around 80,000 workers gathered in George Square to fight for a 40-hour week. Deploying tactics that Mrs Thatcher was to use against the miners 60-odd years later, the police launched a series of brutal attacks on demonstrators. Within days, more than 10,000 English troops, backed by tanks and heavy artillery, moved into Glasgow as the Westminster government feared a Bolshevist revolution. Scottish soldiers in nearby Maryhill barracks were locked down amid fears that they might be tempted to participate in all the sedition. In 1926 and in 1984, industrial Scotland came out for the miners against the interests of a rightwing government and its big-business backers.

Perhaps Margaret Thatcher did turn around the economy, but the good times lasted barely a single generation. Her actions opened a Pandora's box of unfettered and unregulated City greed that has brought Britain lower than it was in 1979. The 1970s were good for British workers until Mrs Thatcher's industrial reforms. They would never regain that standard of living as she ensured that only the "right sort" would benefit from her revolution.

Meanwhile, captains of the financial sector should build a golden calf to her. For it was her council house ownership crusade that made the brokers rich. Barely 20 years later, there is little in the way of social housing and our economy has been sacrificed on a bonfire of unaffordable mortgages. This is Mrs Thatcher's legacy.

As English society tears itself apart again, Scotland looks on bemused and, once again, each country seems a stranger to the other.

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