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, once again, to reach a judgment on the landmark 1979 election that swept Margaret Thatcher to power – but with more evidence to hand this time.

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

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 eventual recovery in the 1990s.

To me, it was always unconvincing. Growth rates through the 1980s were no higher than in the 1970s, when the country was supposed to be a basket case.

Furthermore, much of the industry wiped out by the mad, monetarist, slash-and-burn experiment of the early 1980s never came back.

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 abandoned manufacturing to the brutal rule of the market, selfish individualism and the denial of something called society.

It is impossible to explain to under-35s just how awful the 1980s were to live through, the merciless crushing of opposition and the piling up of human casualties, not least in the still ravaged Northern communities. It is also astonishing, looking back, just how much Margaret Thatcher was hated, epitomised by Elvis Costello’s Tramp The Dirt Down and Morrisey’s Margaret on the Guillotine.

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 (appalling public services and soaring poverty).

Even after 30 years, the Thatcher rap sheet just keeps growing.