Ding dong! Some of us don't get it, do we?  The street party-goers, that is, who joyfully celebrated Baroness Thatcher's death.

Firstly, death party celebrations are just inappropriate and unseemly.  That's not to say jigging in the streets to rejoice some hated leader’s demise is always in bad taste.

Take Hitler, Stalin and Mao, for example.  Who wouldnt dance with joy to mark the end of such monsters? Let's hope they really did go where the goblins go.

And when the current lot in North Korea bite the dust, that too might be the time for a spot of the Gay Gordons in George Square.

But Maggie Thatcher wasn't in that league. She wasn't even a wicked witch.  And though I sometimes shouted the 'f' word when she appeared on the telly, she was certainly no fascist.  Nor was she a tyrant or a dictator. 

She was democratically elected. Fair enough, she scored barely 40% of the popular vote but in the democracy we call Great Britain, election winners rarely do better.  And three times she led the Conservatives to commanding victories.

Huge swathes of the better-off working class in England abandoned Labour for her.  Thanks to her, tens of thousands of them gleefully bought their council houses and purchased shares in the publicly-owned concerns she privatised.

Mrs Thatcher was brutally uncaring and stubbornly insensitive. Her governments caused misery to thousands of communities and millions of individuals. They squandered Scotland's oil riches.  She gravely damaged the society she perversely insisted did not exist.

She deserves the righteous anger of Glenda Jackson.   She doesn't deserve a lavish, publicly-financed funeral.  But she doesn't deserve people dancing on her grave either.

Secondly, and more to the point, the celebrations are irrelevant.  Mrs Thatcher went away in 1990.  But Thatcherism didn't.

The administrations which followed her – those of Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron – have all pursued versions of her ideology.  Both Blair and Brown invited the retired Thatcher to Number 10, eager to be shown publicly to have assumed her mantle.  The Iron Lady herself said New Labour was her greatest achievement.

Blair and Brown further de-regulated and fuelled up the debt-bloated, casino capitalism she unleashed.  Just months before it all came crashing down on our heads, Brown heaped lavish, sycophantic congratulations on the chief culprits – the bankers and financiers of the City of London.

A whole generation has known nothing but Thatcherism. It has soaked deeply into the English consciousness.  New Labour's election materials down south are now coloured red-white-and-blue. It has adopted the One Nation slogan of 19th century Tories.

In Scotland, the Labour administrations up to 2007 did nothing to challenge the Thatcherite consensus. Johan Lamont's current Big Ideas are charges on higher education and care for the elderly.

Thatcherism has won in England.  In election after election, Scots have repeatedly rejected it.   Yet we are stuck with its consequences.

The lesson of Mrs Thatcher's terrible legacy in Scotland is that Scots will always be stuck with what the people of England vote for, whether we like it or not. 

What we are currently stuck with are public spending cuts on a scale even Thatcher never attempted, a creeping privatisation of the health service even she pulled back from and a pervasive sharp-elbowed selfishness that even she might have found worrying.

The great majority of the English are relaxed about this - especially in the prosperous south which has the votes and the wealth to win elections.

Don't be fooled by the heartfelt protests from abandoned mining towns and deprived urban estates. For the foreseeable future, England will be content to be governed by the slightly different kinds of the New Thatcherism represented by the Con-Dem coalition and New One Nation Labour. 

If Scotland wants a destiny free from Maggie's dolorous shadow, it will have to uncouple itself from London rule.

A Scotland liberated from Thatcherism.  Now that really would be a reason to dance in the streets.