I REMEMBER vividly when school milk was abolished by then education secretary Margaret Thatcher. I was six.

I was a 16-year-old in 1983 when the school leaving options were a Youth Opportunities Scheme until 18 or the dole.

My husband was a teenager in Liverpool in the 1980s, when Boys From The Blackstuff was not only a TV programme but reality for many once proud working men on Merseyside whose lives were put in “managed decline” by the PM of the day, Thatcher.

So you could say that my generation of 40-somethings are more than qualified to talk about the new proposal for our August bank holiday — a proposal submitted as a Bill in the House of Commons by far-right fanatic Peter Bone MP.

His Bill, which gets a second reading on January 17, is to rename our bank holiday “Margaret Thatcher Day.”

No government, Tory or Labour, has the divine right to seek to rename a public holiday after a socially divisive figure such as Thatcher.

A woman who turned a blind eye to facts and made it her personal mission to desecrate the coal-mining industry and destroy the communities around the pits — because she could, and for no other economic reason.

For an MP like Bone, famed for, his stance on strict abortion limits and his stance in opposing same-sex marriage as “totally nuts,” to even get this Bill to a second reading is laughable.

This same MP — whose wife has been employed as his own “executive secretary” and has earned £40,000 a year for it — seriously wants more than half of the electorate to have this abomination of a day foisted upon us.

An MP whose own party sees him as a total clown and a sheer embarassment to the front bench.

His views are more akin to the extreme right of Ukip, views that even the back-bench 1922 Committee felt were no use in modernising times, and so booted his backside out of its executive in 2012.

I am sure the people waiting in vain for a council house that fails to materialise due to Thatcher’s council house sell-off, the miners who saw their lives and communities destroyed, the once proud shipbuilders thrown on the scrapheap, the mums who saw their child benefit frozen in consecutive years in the late ’80s and the children who sat in classrooms with rain pouring through the ceilings will certainly not want a Margaret Thatcher Day.

Thatcher deigned to die under the rule of this coalition government. Nick Clegg could have done so much more in opposing the sheer opulence of her funeral, but decided to follow his Tory masters’ every wish.

While the Tories mourned her passing, the rest of the electorate remembered the hardships she put us through, the hiding of truths under her watch of the Hillsborough disaster, the “managed decline” of our once proud working-class communities thrown to the wolves and into lives of poverty, while she gloried in a war that should never have been fought in the Falklands.

Margaret Thatcher Day cannot and must not be allowed to happen. Our public bank holidays belong to us, the public.

MPs like Peter Bone have no right to even attempt to hijack a bank holiday in the name of a woman who was so reviled by large sections of society.

We need to voice our opposition and lobby our MPs to prevent this Bill going any further. Margaret Thatcher Day is not only an insult to millions of impoverished working-class people, it is one abomination too far from this arrogant, nasty government.

We the public insist on protecting our bank holidays. A day of rest, free from the reminder of the tyranny of Margaret Thatcher.