I'm not a big fan of Mrs Thatcher. I'll blame the Iron Lady for just about everything, from the shambolic state of our railroads to the demise of school milk and the war with Iraq (she must have had a hand in it somewhere).

But school bullying? Even I concede that may be a crime too far. Pat Lerew had no such doubts. Bullying is a sign of lack of respect for authority in school, the president of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers said and that is increasing because the generation of 'Thatcher's children' have grown up, become parents and passed on their selfish attitude to their kids.

"Today's parents were growing up in the 1980s, when there was no such thing as society and it was everyone for themselves," said Mrs Lerew.

"Anything that had monetary value was sold, and anything that had no monetary value was therefore of no value.

"Teachers, who were useless anyway and therefore poorly paid, typified the failures in the success race. Small wonder children of the day grew up with the attitudes that have now manifested themselves in their own children."

I agree that Mrs T played havoc with society's values. She, more than anyone, is probably to blame for today's sickening culture of corporate greed: and for the fat cats who seem to feel no shame at awarding themselves huge pay rises while their employees scrape along on little more than a minimum wage. But while I desperately wanted to believe Mrs Lerew's neat little theory about Mrs Thatcher's part in the rise of school bullying and yobbishness I just couldn't.

Bullying has been around a lot longer than Mrs Thatcher. Certainly there was plenty of it about in the 1960s and 1970s when I was at school - and Prime Minister Thatcher wasn't even a glint in the electorate's eye then. It may be that bullying is more rife in schools today than it was say 20 or 30 years ago. I should be interested to see if there are any figures to support that. But even if it is - and even if it is true that discipline in schools is becoming more difficult to maintain - blaming it all on Mrs Thatcher isn't going to solve anything. As someone who once trained as a teacher, I'd say the problem has at least as much to do with modern namby pamby attitudes towards discipline as with a general culture of greed and self-interest.

What annoyed me most about Mrs Lerew's diatribe was how poorly it was argued. It was full of the kind of childish and sweeping generalisations that only serve to increase divisions in society; to whip up mob hatreds and set one group against another. Anything that had a monetary value back in the 1980s was sold, she said. Yes! I wanted to shout, succumbing to my own dislike of Mrs Thatcher. Except that I knew what she said wasn't fair. Anything that had no monetary value was therefore of no value, Mrs Lerew said. Yes! I wanted to scream: except that once again, what she said was a distortion. There was no such thing as society in the 1980s, Mrs Lerew declared. Yes! I wanted to yell. Except what she said was rubbish; a deliberate misrepresentation of the truth.

People have a competitive instinct that results from millions of years of evolution.

It is part of our nature to be selfish and aggressive. The role of any society is to contain those instincts so we can live together. Mrs Thatcher's project was to reduce the role of society, and to give more of a free rein to individual competitiveness.

I hate what she stood for but she had no intention of abolishing society altogether.

Any right-thinking person, Mrs Lerew included, knows that. She just wanted to reduce the level of its interference in our individual lives.

There is a debate to be had there. Mrs Lerew did not help.

Updated: 09:56 Thursday, April 15, 2004