The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. 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. Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough 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. She was "outraged" when the programmes went ahead. Not all writers were against her. Arthur Scargill and the miners represented the only opposition to the prime minister and her destructive and divisive values and, after the strike, the way was open for the most aggressive neoliberal policies. But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". for the disk. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". studying Thatcher's speeches . She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Superlatives can be agreed: a remarkable first woman PM; the first winner of three elections in a row; brave; tough; relentless; clever; sleeplessly driven by a self-confident conviction that overawed her enemies. She preferred markets, and a strong but minimal central state that backed their rule. Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. 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. Emery Evans . Instead, her Big Bang blew the roof off City profits and property booms filled the gap where productive industry should have sprouted. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. Margaret Thatcher: sitcom star - British Comedy Guide . The spell of community. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. I was on my own. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher emerged as one of the first world leaders to champion climate science, issuing a call to action to fight manmade global warming at the Second World Climate Conference hosted at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It knew what Thatcher wanted. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's ", 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. This has been a terrible labour, she said. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. For the most part, it has not been undone. . Margaret Thatcher's Eulogy for Ronald Reagan- Rhetorical Analysis Essay This book shows how. But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. 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. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. 'The Crown' Season 4: Did Margaret Thatcher Really Sound - Decider Gillian Anderson's Portrayl of Margaret Thatcher's Voice in 'The Crown Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. While Labour was now "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", ambitious feminism wanted to be let in to the boardroom and every corridor of power that and little else is what they mean by changing the world. 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. 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%. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. Margaret Thatcher Essay 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. We might now be taking stock, post credit crunch, of our losses and gains since the 1986 deregulation of the City, but it is doubtful that we will ever undo her legacy. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. Faced down trade union leaders after her early years apprentice years, when Jim Callaghan's Britain was falling apart in which the commonest fear was that the little lady would not be able to deal with them across the table. morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. She was able to reach But she also provided great material. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. Even the nasty politics of "welfare reform" is driven by the high cost of subsidising low pay through in-work benefits, and indifference to the plight of jobless communities who have never recovered from de-industrialisation. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. She was always the Spitting Image bully. I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . 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. The Big Bang of City deregulation, the Tell Sid scramble for buying and selling shares, the sense that money is the highest value, wealth the greatest sign of worth all these were hallmarks of the Thatcher era in its mid-80s pomp. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society" and is Endeavouring to persuade the British into an attitude of hostility to the group with which she spent 11 years deepening their connection must take a high place in any catalogue of anti-statesmanship. In January 1976, Thatcher delivered a speech at Kensington Town Hall in London, and spoke about the Iron Curtain the political boundary that separated Europe during World War II. Above all, they lack her competence at running the machinery of government. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. and These developments set a benchmark. Out!" The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. Speech to Conservative Party Conference - Margaret Thatcher Demonising unions and stripping the great mass of private-sector workers of a voice and power in the workplace is still the root of the great living standards crisis that saw the share of wealth going to wages slide long before Lehman Brothers failed. If You Want Anything Said Ask a Man, Want Anything Done Ask a Woman see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising Her onslaught on the trade unions left those movements pale imitations of their former selves, too weak to resist the drive to the "flexible labour market" which has seen Britain become the home of what one senior Labour figure calls "crappy jobs", with low pay and no protection. The preface to the No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. Thanks to the comparison with Cameron, we are reminded that the Thatcher reign was more circumspect and well-managed than it seemed at the time. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. Who was 'Iron Lady' Margaret Thatcher? | Live Science "Maggie! If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. 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. Instead state assets and a huge income stream from North sea oil were used to fund a populist programme of tax cuts, privatisation and council housesales. April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. At Cheltenham the following month she She was catapulted into the Conservative leadership by a small group of ideologues centred around a thinktank, determined to roll back the statist ideas that dominated Britain after the postwar Attlee government. In retrospect, in much dissenting commentary there was often a taint of unexamined sexism. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". She also put forward the idea of "a vast . Just look around. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them. Margaret Thatcher's Eulogy for Ronald Reagan: Essay The word "free" is used to help the audience Arguably, it was not the sale of council houses that was the problem, but the failure to replace the stock and maintain a sufficient supply of affordable homes. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) Margaret Thatcher Fast Facts | CNN Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. It's true that whenever there's a major news story, millions of people immediately begin strip-mining it for puns and bon mots, making it harder for professional comics to develop focused, funny material that nobody's heard before. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. 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. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. 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. North sea oil was squandered when it should have seeded new industries. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. Margaret Thatcher - HISTORY This does lead to divisions. In 1982, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a church for 12 days in protest against "police illegality and racism in King's Cross" the area to which many sex workers known as "Thatcher's girls" had travelled from high unemployment areas in the Midlands and the north. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. 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. 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. a Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. I don't see that. CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White We liked disliking her. It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. She fervently believed the market would soon repair their loss. She lost seven cabinet ministers on the Europe question, a record that permeated the party for years afterwards. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. It chose her ina fit of desperation, hats and all though it quite liked the hats. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. 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. with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician defended Ronald What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. outlook at the time. And that made it easy to mock her. This report of the Conservative party conference ran in the Guardian on Saturday October 11 1980, Edited and full versions of Margaret Thatcher's 'The lady's not for turning' speech, delivered at the Conservative party conference in Brighton on 10 October 1980, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every Underestimating Ronald Reagan was an error committed by many of his critics and opponents; Reagan never minded a bit, thinking that being underestimated yielded him a significant advantage. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. She would not have been half the . speech in the House of Commons, her John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. One leading Tory thinker said current academic concepts such as evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics were fundamentally rightwing; another said disruptive digital technology liberated individuals against powerful behemoths which may be true, but some of the most striking online advances harness the collective spirit. Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Margaret Thatcher has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings. Before the real Thatcher's election in 1979 she took lessons with a speech coach at the Royal National Theatre, hoping to make her voice more commanding and less "shrill" in broadcasts. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. She was a gentle and peaceable woman my mother, that is and said few hard words about anyone, but in certain parts of the United Kingdom, and among certain social classes, Mrs T was detested, and not just for what people thought were her policies but for her persona for what she was. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. "You would see MPs who came into any politics after Ihad and who were no better than me being promoted over my head," said Currie this week. She considered European Commission president Jacques Delors a campaigner for . Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office. It was a visit warmly welcomed by President Reagan, with a resplendent state nner on the first evening. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. 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. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. There are still some great comics doing political material, with Mark Steel and Mark Thomas flying the flag of alternative comedy, while people such as Josie Long and Chris Coltrane find the funny in activism. 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. Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers. Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. Not the loss of imperial markets, not lazy management, not the education system, not the decline of the industrial ethic: bitter men standing on platforms and asking for a show of hands to down tools were solely to blame. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. Maggie! 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.
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