Dom Aversano

Musician and part-time shop worker from London. He started a petition on Change.org calling for Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week.

Eight days ago I started a petition hoping for a few thousand signatures. The petition is now not much shy of half a million. Yesterday I handed it into the Department for Work and Pensions. This is my short account of what happened.

Matthew Handley

Oxford history student, Debate Mate mentor, football fanatic

Ninety-six fans, sons and daughters never made it home, and it was all the fault of their fellow Liverpool supporters. This was the narrative that Margaret Thatcher played a crucial role in perpetuating. There will have been few tears shed on Merseyside on Monday evening at her demise.

Mark Hillary

British tech, culture, and globalisation writer based in São Paulo

Thatcher still manages to divide opinion in a way that no other British leader has achieved. Even Tony Blair's false wars don't create the same kind of hatred.

Hannah Buchanan

Writer, particularly interested in LGBT issues

Those heaping vituperation upon Thatcher should also know that she was not just a politician but a wife, a grandmother and a mother. How are her family supposed to grieve with mob like disgusting behaviour going on?

Judi Sutherland

Poet and freelance writer

We are often told that the UK lags behind other countries when it comes to the number of women in senior roles: as Members of Parliament, on company boards, or otherwise visible in public life. I have a feeling that at least some of this phenomenon is directly attributable to Mrs Thatcher herself.

Liz Jarvis

Journalist and blogger

Rather than making me into a Tory, my experience of life in Britain under Thatcher ensured that I would never vote Conservative.

Richard Stacy

Social media strategist

The last 30 years have shown that if you pursue a Thatcherite approach, as admirable as its values might seem at the time, all you end up creating is a society which allows the most aggressive and self-interested to reach the top of both politics and business.

Hanna Flint

Journalist and Radio Producer

On April 8 2013, the masses turned out to celebrate Margaret Thatcher's death on the streets of Brixton, but there was barely a face among the merry gathering old enough to understand the good and the bad she brought to this country.

Professor Klaus Dodds

Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London

The Falklands Referendum of March 2013 owes much to Margaret Thatcher. She created and maintained a political orthodoxy which remains unchallenged today. Every subsequent British government has publicly reaffirmed the right of the Falklands community to self-determine their future.

Neil Scott

Lefty blogger who is based in Scotland and who supports the movement for an Independent Scotland.

I spoke at a Yes (for Scottish Independence) meeting last night and found it really difficult to speak thinking of how that old woman was looked after in the Ritz hotel in her dying days because"it gave the best care," while generations of my family have died in ward beds, in pain, and worrying that they were a burden

Roz Morris

Media Trainer and Broadcast PR expert at TV News London Ltd

As a woman with brains and ambition, Mrs Thatcher thought all this stagnation wasn't a joke. She thought she could do better. And she did.

Peter G Tatchell

Human rights campaigner

True, she was an extraordinary woman but she was extraordinary for mostly the wrong reasons. So many of her policies were flawed and often heartless. Nevertheless, I don't rejoice in her death. I commiserate, as I do with the death of any person. I send condolences to her family and friends.

Diane Abbott

MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington

Thatcher was certainly not a feminist either in principle or in practise. She is alleged to have said that feminism was "poison". Far from seeing herself as a role model to female politicians, she actually promoted fewer female MPs than her male predecessors. She was the archetypal successful woman who revelled in being 'one of the boys'. But in a curious way the cult around her, particularly in the later years of her career, was one that could only have been excited by a woman.

Professor Ian Robertson

Author of The Winner Effect: The Neuroscience of Success and Failure. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin and Visiting Professor at University College London

Power's action on the brain has many similarities to drugs like cocaine, and can cause similar changes to the brain, including, in extreme cases, a sort of addiction to power. Margaret Thatcher found it exceedingly difficult to live without this drug and harbored a bitter and unforgiving resentment against the colleagues who brought her down until dementia came over her.

Charlotte Lytton

Journalist and gin connoisseur

What worries me most about Thatcher's death is not the Bieber generation tweeting their desperate confusion about why someone's name they don't recognise is trending. What is far more concerning than that is how Britain's only ever female leader being gone will impact the future of women in politics.

Holly Black

Editorial Assistant at Art Quarterly and freelance writer/curator specialising in feminist art practices.

The Twittersphere went wild with a torrent of hateful celebrations and equally hateful rebukes. Everyone seems to want to voice a very vocal opinion on how they feel about the death of the Iron Lady. What I find most interesting, and amazing, is that most of these public declarations come from my generation.