The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech We liked disliking her. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), who in 1979 would become Great Britain's first female Prime Minister, traveled to the United States and Canada in September 1975, seven months after becoming the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, then out of power. As the coalition sets about shrinking the welfare state, it's still embarked on Thatcher's project of rolling back the frontiers of the state, dismantling the settlement that held from 1945 until it unravelled in the 1970s. Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Lady Thatcher, you honor us by coming to the site of Sir Winston's pivotal speech, an event Westminster College has immortalized with the beautiful Winston Churchill Memorial. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. She describes Reagan as her friend and continues to narrate his good acts in America during his presidency. But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. In 1990 Thatcher authorised the then British secretary of state Peter Brooke to reopen back-channel negotiations with republicans. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. Less noted . "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. Speech to Conservative Party Conference - Margaret Thatcher In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. Margaret Thatcher - Quotes, Death & Life - Biography they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the There are many reasons for this. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. Without it, she would have been nothing. Margaret Thatcher 'the Lady's not for turning' - YouTube In his usual slightly dishevelled style, he went to Downing Street to discuss his pioneering concepts of behavioural economics and attempts to implement them under Barack Obama. Maggie! Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . That was the daunting task Margaret Thatcher set herself when she arrived in Downing Street in May 1979 at the end of a traumatic decade that had seen a three-day week, inflation topping 25%, a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the winter of discontent. But there were also cuts for basic-rate taxpayers: the 1988 budget, for example, cut the top rate of tax from 60% to 40% and the standard rate from 27% to 25%. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." A Study of the Emotional Eulogy of Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. In the 2004 eulogy in honor of the late president, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher uses a series of rhetorical devices such as parallelism, repetition, and ethos to convey the message in which Reagan was much more than an excellent president. But if today's Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow's TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. Chvez is gone, but the voters are likely to re-elect Chavismo on 14 April. For those miners and their families to be referred to as the "enemy within" by Thatcher was something they would never forgive and, if there is rejoicing at her death in those communities she set out to destroy, it can only be understood against this background. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. The core of this site is a massive database of MT's public statements of all kinds across the years (speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc), searchable by date, subject, importance, and keyword. There was, for example, the time in the late 1970s when, as Opposition Leader, she almost succeeded in censoring the one half-decent joke in a key campaign speech. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. It is full of insights into a neglected aspect of how Thatcher came to dominate British politics." (Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield, UK) "A fascinating insight into the world of speech writing. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. The result . Emery Evans . I am reminded of this every time the debate comes up about whether more female bylines would reduce sexism in the media. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. On one visit, our campaign chairman, William J Casey, later director of the CIA, came along, and we had a fruitful meeting at 10 Downing Street. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. her maiden So instead: "I put it to her that we would be saving money." make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. Norman and Margaret hold, and will always hold, a unique place in our esteem and affection. Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. ROBIN HARRIS worked for the Conservative Party from 1978, and increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. "Yes and that was one of the many weird things about her," smirked Alexei Sayle. It isn't sad for anyone else. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. There is now, however, an opportunity to commit to a new politics that learns lessons from her ambition yet undoes the damage and focuses on reconstruction. April 25, 2020. In short, miners believed in society. . June 30, 1992 - Swearing . Yet despite the attempts of some columnists to claim otherwise, Thatcher can't really be seen as "a warrior in the sex war", let alone as "the ultimate women's libber". You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.". Margaret Thatcher Essay | Best Writing Service Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. This was a historic step, and resulted in further reinforcing the US-UK alliance. It's interesting, though, that even when comedians try to be political, they can never really land a punch on David Cameron, Nick Clegg or George Osborne. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. Margaret Thatcher Fast Facts | CNN At Cheltenham the following month she Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. in his defence during the IranContra affair later that year.. Elected for a third term in June 1987, she told She invited the We watched as her high heels went click-click-click across the stones of the Acropolis and the cement floors of Tito's steel mills. That did the trick.). She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. It was seen for what it was, nothing to do with economics, but purely an attempt to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers by wiping out the entire industry. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just another one bites the dust " This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. She made her maiden She undoubtedly rescued the prestige of the country from its postwar nadir, but at a high cost to the generosity of its political and social culture. ", As Matthew Parris evocatively put it in Monday's Times, "She rather liked men (preferring our company, perhaps, to that of women), [but] she thought us the weaker sex. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. of times. While she spoke of his example as a beacon, she knew very well that she was an important component of what is often attributed solely to him, and in the first instance "winning" the cold war. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. Reagan would often hasten to remind those paying tribute to his cold war strategy that it was, in the strictest sense of the term, a team effort. the British Embassy in Paris and stated Getting the record straight. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries. What Is Wrong With Margaret Thatcher's Voice On 'The Crown - Esquire She may have got it slightly wrong. There were sporadic resurrections. Gillian Anderson's Portrayl of Margaret Thatcher's Voice in 'The Crown He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference The fact is that if both sides removed their ideological blinkers, as Thatcher, remarkably perhaps, managed to do, then her trilogy of speeches in the late 1980s still offer some of the best and . Larkin's evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. It chose her ina fit of desperation, hats and all though it quite liked the hats. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. Now it was the turn of the words, and no one, of course, would, against all the odds, do them better than the lady who, 25 years before, once thought the sky was beyond her limit. LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. But unlike Thatcher, president Hugo Chvez of Venezuela, the "president of the poor", fought for a caring economy and against the rule of the market. As the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher, I was given special permission by the Cabinet Secretary to see government papers not yet released to the public.For . Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her. The Texan who stole the show at Margaret Thatcher's funeral Only today are we facing the cost. Prime Minister Thatcher inherited a settled state of British Europeanness, in which Brussels and the [European] Community began to influence, and often determine, the British way of doing things. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. 100% Success rate. But she also provided great material. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Scotsman Obituaries: Sir Bernard Ingham, formidable press secretary to a new dominance from Brussels". She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. I just now watched the British Gas one again. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. Would we like her back? as far as can be known. in his defence during the IranContra affair, told Though she recognised the dangers of global warming, Thatcher's industrial and economic policies prioritised economic growth. Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. By raising the pay of their own staff to a minimum of the living wage, they have set an example which a growing number of large private-sector employers have followed. But perhaps her greatest legacy was New Labour. If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. Such items have an I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. And the single mums. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. She was, of course, the first and so far only female British prime minister, Jon Snow reiterated on Monday night, insinuating that this achievement should in general be celebrated, never mind the specifics of her leadership. Everything has its season. Meanwhile, you struggle to identify deep thinkers in party ranks beyond a couple of veteran stalwarts; even the left's thinktanks appear moribund or merely harking back to an idealised past. This does lead to divisions. This is the area where we need to make progress not just in restoring strong local government, but in understanding that democracy means more than a Westminster vote. Had Jim Callaghan won the 1979 election, he too would have faced the challenge of how to modernise an economy beset by high inflation, weak management and poor industrial relations. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Margaret Thatcher - UN General Assembly Climate Change Speech (1989) Margaret Thatcher's landmark Bruges speech about the future of Europe was never intended to push the UK towards the exit, the man who wrote it says. We are all on our own. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. Margaret Thatcher's legacy: roundup of the best writing A week later she spoke But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? Perhaps Labour would benefit from another defeat, given the danger of taking power unprepared and turning into a zombie government, like the tragedy unfurling in France. Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. Hats. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. It's telling that Tony Blair's domestic legacy amounts to two responses to Thatcherism: forcing Labour to accept it and then compensating for the damage the Tories had wreaked through sustained underinvestment in the public realm. This is an especially pertinent problem given its heartfelt desire for redistribution of wealth. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. Many of today's more controversial benefits, such as disability, date back to the 80s. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. Peggy Noonan. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world. As I spread my wings in politics, I discovered many Thatcher voters down south who were the same kind of people who loathed her in Scotland. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). How dare her apologists and beneficiaries of her legacy refer to trade unions like the NUM as "corrupt" in the face of their bonuses and tax cuts! Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. Everyone knows that. This zest for ideas was boosted by the 2010 intake, which comprises just under half the parliamentary party. As a physician, she has been a vocal advocate for a single-payer healthcare system that would . On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. The resignation was announced Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. Reagan, for one, recognized the importance of Margaret Thatcher's presence as British prime minister, but would caution any discussionpartnerthat Pope John Paul played an equally important role. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. When she walked into Downing Street promising harmony instead of discord, only one in seven children was poor and Britain was more equal than at any time in modern history. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. This was her last important public statement. She was right, he was wrong. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time. Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. The challenge for the left is to fashion new and genuinely progressive policies in an age of austerity, when more money is not the answer to any question. True, Labour, James Callaghan and the unions played their part by blocking Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife attempt to create German or Nordic co-operation between unions and industry that might have rescued unions from Thatcher's crushing. 1971 was the year of Ted Heath's Conservative government, which was trying to make huge savings to the budget. As leader she was initially hyper-cautious. This was hardly the first or even the worst example of a dig at Thatcher tinged so needlessly with sexism. It knew what Thatcher wanted. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. Margaret Thatcher's government defended structured political and religious discrimination and political vetting in the north, legislated for political censorship and institutionalised, to a greater extent than ever before, collusion between British state forces and unionist death squads. Her imitators swerve all over the place, with 37 U-turns at the Telegraph's latest count on matters from forests and pasties to buzzard nests and caravans. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. Britain's relative decline came to an end, although that was more due to slowdowns in countries such as France and Germany than an acceleration in UK productivity growth. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. All rights reserved. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias.
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