Social problems did, of course, exist: they always do. But in a relatively wealthy society, and one which was getting richer, these were increasingly, in essence, problems of a degree of moral breakdown, something that governments are not well placed to address, and can make fools of themselves (if not worse) if they try. Few Prime Ministers have had a keener sense of the moral dimension than Margaret Thatcher. But she was sufficiently clear-sighted to direct her energies, and those of her government, to those problems which public policy can solve, and which only public policy can solve, rather than those which it cannot.

And in any event the current severe recession has reminded anyone who may have forgotten of the central importance of getting economic policy, in all its many aspects, broadly right. The revival of simple-minded neo-Keynesianism, which, for reasons that should be well understood, has never worked in the past, will soon pass. A more fundamental question is whether economic and financial deregulation, one of the central pillars of the Thatcher government's economic policy, went too far - and indeed whether free-market capitalism has had its day. To declare oneself for or against regulation is as absurd as to declare oneself for or against law. It depends on what the regulations are and what they are about. Here again there has been a great deal of myth-making. The Thatcher government inherited a grotesquely over-regulated economy, covering pay, prices, dividends, the location of industry, pretty well every aspect of the labour market and much else besides. All this was swept aside, to great benefit.

But the Financial Services Act of 1986, however flawed it may have proved to be (although the greatest failure has been the way in which it has been implemented under the present government), was an act of regulation, not deregulation. It replaced a patchy and informal system which had been rendered obsolete by the rapid development of the financial services industry in an era of increasing globalisation and the internationalisation of the City of London (to the great benefit of the British economy) following the so-called "Big Bang" reforms of the London stock exchange. And I myself was sufficiently concerned at the inadequacy of the vitally important prudential regulation of the banks that, in order to strengthen it, I introduced the Banking Act of 1987 (to replace the previous Labour government's defective Banking Act of 1979), which inter alia created a high-powered Board of Banking Supervision. The fact that this was subsequently abolished by Gordon Brown, to be replaced by a largely dysfunctional system, can scarcely be laid at the door of the Thatcher government.