During the past few days there has been much discussion of her legacy in the media and on the internet, with Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, the Conservative History website, and even the BBC getting in on the act.

However, with all the fawning praise and, conversely, criticism from the Left, very little in the way of analysis has been given to Thatcher’s Governments from a conservative perspective. How about the traditionally conservative argument that Thatcher’s governments did nothing to stop the social and cultural revolution that has been taking place in this country since the late 1950s?

Firstly, we have to establish the solid fact that Mrs Thatcher was certainly not a conservative – she was a liberal. Her free market ideology was influenced by the economist Milton Friedman and the author Friedrich Hayek, both of whom described themselves as liberals and explicitly said they were not conservatives.

Furthermore, conservatism has not traditionally supported the ideas of any particular type of economic system, free market or not. Traditional conservatism has sought to maintain social stability through maintenance and gradual progression, rather than rapid transition, of the current social order.

The market system which Thatcher imposed upon Britain radically altered our society in a very short period of time – some of the effects of which we are only just beginning to feel now. It was an economic revolution rather than a slow and gradual process.

Thatcher was responsible for among the greatest surrenders of British sovereignty to the European Union. She signed the Single European Act in 1986 which was particularly unconservative, because wisdom suggests that although the nation state is not the only possible solution as a form of political order, it is a tried and tested solution that largely works and the only environment in which democracy seems permitted.

The EU, whose aim it is to sweep away the old order of nation states, democratic traditions, and accumulated knowledge, and replace it with a new, untested supranational construct in which sovereignty is passed to a higher level than the nation, is fundamentally alien to conservatism. While she did, in the end, perhaps wake up to the undemocratic and destructive nature of European integration – it was by then too late.

Margaret Thatcher was uninterested in the defence of selective education and Grammar schools, despite the fact that she had attended one. Instead her Governments submitted to the equality agenda and destruction of these schools.

During the sixties the Labour party began to pursue their Comprehensive school agenda with much more vigour, despite it being acknowledged that the pursuit of equality of outcome would lead to a decline in educational rigour and standards. Yet, it was in her capacity as Education Secretary under Edward Heath that she approved more applications for Grammar schools to be turned into Comprehensives than any previous period.

Further, this surrender to the Left and the educational revolution taking place in Britain extended into her own Governments where she refused to reopen or build a single new Grammar school.

It must be made absolutely clear that if you do not have selection by ability, which is by far the fairest method of selection, then you do not remove it altogether but simply replace it with another means by which schools choose their pupils. Academic selection now takes place in Comprehensive schools by wealth (by means of catchment areas where only the richest can afford the properties prices of houses near the best schools and poorer families are forced out), by religion and by the use of ‘interviews’ where the middle classes benefit at the expense of the poor.

Thatcher’s Governments failed to reverse the creeping levels of political correctness entering our society, or to protect marriage or prevent an enormous growth in the size and power of the public sector. She failed to reform the National Health Service when she had the opportunity, or the BBC whose progressive influence on British society has been so damaging since.

Her Governments did not seek to challenge the liberal-Left on its social and moral agenda, and her decade long rule helped to undermine personal responsibility and British liberties. In so many ways Margaret Thatcher continued the liberalisation of our society that begun in the late fifties, through her economic reforms and her indifference to the cultural agenda of the Left.

The strange, reverent cult that has built up around her image and legacy certainly needs to be examined more closely, because I do not necessarily believe that Margaret Thatcher is deserving of some of the praise she seems to have won.

Since the 1960s, when Labour’s Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland first decided on the importance of controlling society through culture rather than just the economy, the political Left have ideologically pursued a comprehensive state education system whose aim has been ‘equality’ rather than to give children a good and rigorous education.

It should also be said that much of the Left have not actually changed their views or indeed their end goals in any conceivable way. What they have done is simply changed the way in which they have gone about achieving those goals, through culture and social engineering rather than economic means.

What is more, unsurprisingly for a party (the Conservatives) who tend to measure their success in office by how many years they have occupied 10 Downing Street, rather than what they have actually achieved in that time, then they have been completely outmanoeuvred by this fundamental shift in attention by the Left.

In fact, in an effort to remain in office, rather than in power, the Conservatives have consistently accepted and adopted the Left’s proposals on education – especially regarding comprehensive schooling and the reintroduction of academic selection – along with many other issues, as can now be seen once again under the leadership of David Cameron.

Returning again to the matter of independent faith schools, they are most certainly next in Labour’s sights as the Government attempts to gain its coveted monopoly over primary and secondary education. Incidentally, for the same ideological reasons, the Government have also recently attacked home schooling (which has seen a dramatic increase in recent years as parents have realised how thoroughly the comprehensive education system is failing their children) by claiming without basis that home education may be a cover for child abuse.

Peter Hitchens, who covered in some depth the Government’s attacks on home schooling, perceptively observed:

What the modern left really don’t like about homeschooling is that it is independent of the state, and threatens its egalitarian monopoly from below. If it became a mass movement, it would be very dangerous to their project of enforcing equality of outcome, while using the schools to push radical ideas on sex, drugs, morality and politics.

Much the same can be said for faith schools. They challenge the state’s egalitarian monopoly and that is why our Labour Government will, in due course, attempt to bring them to heel. In that sense The Telegraph story perfectly illustrates the classic way in which the Labour party first attacks its chosen target. The Telegraph’s Education Editor, Graeme Paton, writes:

Ed Balls insisted ‘concerns’ had been raised about the extent to which [faith] schools were preparing pupils for ‘life in wider British society’.

But by whom exactly have these mysterious ‘concerns’ been raised? Parents? Teachers, perhaps? Trade Unions? Nope. It doesn’t take long to find out where these ‘concerns’ have originated from, with the next paragraph reading:

It follows a report last month from the think-tank Civitas which claimed some Islamic schools were promoting fundamentalist views.

So, we have the source. A think-tank. Not criticism from parents, or teachers or trade unions or any other such organisation actually related to the schools in question, but a think-tank.

In addition, it’s not even all faith schools that have raised these pressing ‘concerns’ but specifically a small minority of Islamic educational institutions. But, of course, while these supposed ‘concerns’ may only be directed at a small number of faith schools, any Governmental legislative or regulatory response will be targeted at all faith schools, regardless of religion.

Here we have not the reason but the excuse for government intervention, however tenuous the supporting evidence may be. Furthermore, when the comprehensive state education system has, in the opinion of many, an increasingly poor record of preparing pupils for ‘life in wider British society’ – whatever that phrase may really mean – then the Government hardly have the moral high ground in criticising independent establishments.

This leads us back to the original point that the Labour party and much of the modern left are not interested in rigorous and good education, but are instead ideologically committed to instilling in all children radical ideas on sex, drugs, morality and politics, as well as attempting to enforce equality of outcome, whatever the cost of such an exercise may be.

You may have thought that our educational system was meant to be a place for actually educating children; instilling in them fact and intellectual rigour rather than a method of profound and radical social engineering.

Well, if you thought that modern schooling was about learning and teaching then sadly you’re mistaken. Successive British Governments have slowly shaped the educational establishment around the equality agenda and the desire to force everyone down one set path.

In real terms this has meant the gradual decline of standards over the past few decades. This has been exemplified by changes in the examination system, with exams having been purposefully made easier to such an extent that seemingly nobody can actually fail one. Furthermore, through the destruction of Grammar schools and the selective system, the brightest and best children have been thoroughly failed by being held back to further the creation of a more ‘equal’ generation of children.

At the opposite end of the scale, and rather unsurprisingly, those desperately claiming that educational standards have increased (when everyone else can quite clearly see they have substantially decreased) are Government ministers, schools and curious liberal children’s groups, who themselves, like successive governments are in fact more interested in social engineering from the bottom upwards rather than actually educating young and eager minds, or the very least have a self-interest in perpetuating the increasing standards myth.

Top Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge have been forced to make students sit their own special entrance exams because A-levels do not help differentiate between the best applicants, and other Universities and further education institutes are complaining that many students they receive cannot even spell, use basic grammar or do simple arithmetic.

As we have seen recently, when there is actual ‘education’ involved in the system, it is used primarily to indoctrinate – the latest prime example of this being the Government wishing to distribute Al Gore’s dubious and politically biased climate change film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to every school in Britain. Thankfully this is being challenged in the high court at the moment – but Ministers will only try again at a later stage and with something else. Perhaps this is another reason why the whole educational establishment should be taken out of the hands of government and privatised?