In her 1982 party conference speech, Margaret Thatcher offered a prediction for the future: "How absurd it will seem in a few years' time that the state ran Pickfords removals and Gleneagles Hotel . Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. She all but erased his political legacy to stamp her own image on the nation, so Britain before and after Thatcher were two different countries. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. At her first conference speech, she chastised the Labour Party on economic . see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising She forced us to decide what was truly important. At times the Conservative party is so anarchic as to appear almost ungovernable, like a plethora of pressure groups pushing pet causes rather than a united group ruthlessly focusing on political success. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . The machinery of modern political management polls, consulting, focus groups is deployed mainly to discover what will make aparty and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. . March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . Although the "right to buy" and the privatisation of utilities by selling shares to new small investors was often justified as giving rights to "the little people", the reality is that the less well-off fell ever further behind the rich. Following in the footsteps of Santa Claus, Steve Hynd quickly compiled a list of all the naughty boys and girls "on the left" who dared to express criticisms of the dearly departed Prime Minister, warning that he "will continue to add to this list throughout the day". She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives 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. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Alamat kami. 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%. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. In retrospect, in much dissenting commentary there was often a taint of unexamined sexism. In short, miners believed in society. There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? Sent Bobby Sands to an Irish hero's grave without a blink. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. 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. M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. On the same edition of Channel 4 News, Louise Mensch named only three successful female politicians as part of her defence ofThatcher and only one of those was a Conservative. Simon Heffer, journalist, historian and friend of Margaret Thatcher, recommends the best books to read to gain an understanding of the United Kingdom's first female prime ministerand explains why she was the most influential British leader of the modern era. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. One also can't forget what happened to the agency that made Thatcher worldfamous: the Conservative party, of which she seemed such an improbable leader. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. She was 87. So the woman I met in Curzon Street, dimpling elegantly, can now be seen in history with an unexpected achievement to her credit. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. She was propped up by police who were encouraged to brutality against not only strikers but communities of colour, already hardest hit by unemployment: police powers were enhanced and their racism given free rein, especially with stop and search; CS gas was used on the mainland for the first time. "No, no, no". Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. But Labour is no less in thrall. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . Thank you, too, Margaret. Out! We had had a strange relationship. She was a radical conservative, known for dismantling nationalized industries and social services, weakening union power.She was also the first incumbent prime minister in the UK removed on a vote of their own party. In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. But the choice captures her perfectly. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. In her thoughtful and prescient remarks, the Prime Minister reached back into history to recall how far the English-Speaking Peoples had come since victory in . Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. The current crop of leaders are so dull, so ill-defined, so lacking in personality that it's almost impossible for comedians to rage against them. That's because, 23 years after she was ejected from Downing Street by her own party in a move whose psychic wounds linger on, the country we live in remains Thatcher's Britain. She would not have been half the . The welfare state, with its unemployment and housing benefits and free healthcare, actually protected wages: employers could not force workers to accept low pay or unpaid overtime because of the job's healthcare provision, as they do in the US. April 8, 2013. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. In the current wall-to-wall media welter, I caught the current leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davison MSP, being asked if Thatcher was an electoral asset for her. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. A Soviet . What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. I don't see that. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . as far as can be known. Margaret Thatcher was not known for her sense of humour. . From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. As working families in poverty now account for more than half of those below the poverty line, a government committed to "making work pay" should surely encourage this trend and raise the minimum wage. 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. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? Emery Evans . Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. 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. A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. The relative wealth of the UK 1% had been falling steadily for 50 years when Thatcher took power in 1979; since then it has climbed steeply and is almost back to 1918 levels. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time, gave a eulogy to the grieving American people in honor of the late Ronald Reagan on June 11th, 2004. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. Getting the record straight. Gaze at the telephone. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. 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. What is really left by Thatcher to history? She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. a It never was. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . To her detractors, Thatcher is the prime minister who wiped out more than 15% of Britain's industrial base with her dogmatic monetarism, squandered the once-in-a-lifetime windfall of North Sea oil on unemployment pay and tax cuts, and made the UK the unbalanced, unequal country it is today. Her Irish policy failed miserably. We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. Promises. The most important thing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did for British politics was to understand the significance of Thatcherism and to decide not to reverse it, indeed to carry it forward. All rights reserved. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. She mesmerised us. In my view, nothing said prior to her passing or since has been inaccurate in the description of this very special, warm relationship, the likes of which we may never see again. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. Thatcher's threat to butcher the mining industry, destroy the fabric of mining communities and in particular the trade union to which miners had a bond of loyalty, was met with the fiercest resistance any government has met in peacetime. she From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". An author and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan staked her claim to speechwriting fame as a primary writer for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.Her notable speeches include Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" address, given on the 40 th anniversary of D-Daythe day Allied troops invaded Normandy in World War IIas well as the former president's . Hats. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. Maggie! As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. On Saturday, 27 February, he wrote in his diary: "PM getting great press went up to the [Capitol] Hill some of the senators tried to give her a bad time, she put them down firmly and with typical British courtesy.". 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. Reagan was especially interested in Mrs Thatcher's domestic policy initiatives, and it was quickly established that the foreign policy views ran along parallel lines. To the extent that there was an industrial strategy, it was to sell Britain as a destination for Japanese car companies and to shift the focus of the economy away from manufacturing towards financial services. It still does. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Out! Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. Thatcher came to personify those ready to push anyone aside to gain power in a man's world and strengthen that world with their ambition. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. Union in a speech Nobody, at least that I know of, objected to that observation on the ground that it was disrespectful to the ability of the Chavez family to mourn in peace. "We have not Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. Margaret Thatcher (October 13, 1925 - April 8, 2013) was the first woman prime minister of the United Kingdom and the first European woman to serve as a prime minister. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. The financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. to secure international action to repair the damaged ozone layer. Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness? And that made it easy to mock her. 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. She became harder than hard. By 1987, anti-Tory tactical voting had taken hold. performance at a Press Conference afterwards. It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. She was not a writer. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. We were not unique in such a response but she failed to appreciate that Scots are balanced, canny folk insofar as we have a well-developed chip on each shoulder. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). Margaret Thatcher has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings.