ON Sunday, it will be exactly 30 years since the ballot boxes were opened, the votes were counted and the country was never the same again. Yes, it’s time to reach a judgement on the landmark 1979 General Election that swept Margaret Thatcher to power – but with more evidence to hand than last time the exercise was tried.

We have known for decades about the huge social cost of the Thatcher years, the mass unemployment, the mass poverty and the dilapidated schools, hospitals and railways.

But the Iron Lady’s supporters could bite back with plausible claims that she stemmed Britain’s long, post-war economic decline and planted the seeds for full recovery in the Nineties. To me, it was always unconvincing.

Growth rates through the Eighties were no higher than in the Seventies, when the country was supposed to be a basket case, thrusting a begging bowl at the International Monetary Fund.

Furthermore, much of the industry wiped out by the mad, monetarist, slash-and-burn experiment of the early Eighties never came back – permanently wrecking our economic base, particularly in the North. Now, even the facade of economic miracle – the explosion in financial services and extraordinary growth of the City of London – has been ripped away by the reality of economic collapse.

Of course, nothing can absolve Gordon Brown of blame for a decade of “light-touch regulation” that allowed the greedy bankers and reckless hedge fund traders to set us on the fateful road to ruin. But it was a journey started by the Thatcher government, which deregulated the City and told us the future lay in the “casino capitalism” of playing the global financial markets.

Worse, that agenda also involved abandoning manufacturing to the brutal rule of the market, selfish individualism and the denial of something called society.

It’s impossible to explain to under-35s just how awful the Eighties were to live through, the merciless crushing of opposition and the piling up of human casualties, not least in Northern communities still ravaged to this day.

It is also astonishing, looking back, just how much Margaret Thatcher was detested, on a different scale to the dislike, or more likely ridicule, thrown at John Major, Tony Blair and Mr Brown. That hatred was immortalised in Elvis Costello’s Tramp The Dirt Down and Morrissey’s Margaret On The Guillotine – songs so many will be playing on the day she finally meets her maker.

Amid the economic ruins of 2009, the regrets should be the bits of Thatcherism that New Labour retained (market rule, privatisation), not the bits that were junked (low taxes, low public spending, roll back the state). Even after 30 years, the Thatcher rap sheet just keeps growing.

DESPERATE parents have already stuffed pie and chips through school gates to rescue their children from the tyranny of lettuce-heavy, Jamie Oliver-approved meals.

Next, it may be chocolate flapjacks. Gateshead East and Washington West Labour MP Sharon Hodgson told ministers: “I have had representations from pupils in Gateshead who felt that taking the chocolate off the top of their flapjacks was a step too far.”

Alas, Schools Minister Jim Knight insisted the snacks failed the nutrition test (with or without chocolate) – even while admitting to enjoying a “chocolate, cranberry and macadamia nut” flapjack the day before.

Such hypocrisy…