To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. defended Ronald A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that Britain's record on innovation and investment have been extremely poor, while the hollowing out of manufacturing left the economy over-dependent on the de-regulated City. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. For the most part, it has not been undone. However, for almost a decade Sinn Fin had been patently trying to build a peace process and unfolding events on the world stage including the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and the release of Mandela were evidence that governments, and apparently intractable situations, could change. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. I was a professional writer. We had had a strange relationship. When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. Indeed a person with achemistry that repelled almost all thesignificant males in Edward Heath's cabinet who could never become theparty leader. Speaking personally, it was a personal privilege beyond measure to have witnessed and participate in the blossoming of the special ties that continued throughout her entire time in office. her maiden Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". She was "outraged" when the programmes went ahead. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. Just look around. But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society. There are many reasons for this. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete 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. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". a new dominance from Brussels", the Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. She forced us to decide what was truly important. Many of today's more controversial benefits, such as disability, date back to the 80s. It was all very well for me to write books. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. But now the history was what mattered. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. The poll-tax rioters. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. She adopts an endearing and sentimental tone using ethos, repetition, and . John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. 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. in a statement the following morning (22 November), hours before she When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. 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. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. Gloves. Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. What's more, it was moulded to the wall as one commentator recalled and you had no right to change it, not without becoming entangled in a state-managed bureaucracy. for the disk. 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. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. The impact that Hayek's writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. Published: Sunday 21st February 2021. All rights reserved. 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. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning? Thatcher is remembered for her achievements, but more for a presence, which was wrapped up with being a woman. This does lead to divisions. That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. What is really left by Thatcher to history? "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. Few would argue that they have not endured. 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. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she Being a woman is undoubtedly one of the features, possibly the most potent, that makes her ascent to power memorable, 25 years on, in a way that applied to no man. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. The Tories triumphed, of course, and lost only two sitting MPs Hamish Gray and the social-security scrounger-bashing Iain Sproat, who vacated his marginal Aberdeen seat and headed for the Scottish Borders, only to suffer defeat there at the hands of the Alliance. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Everyone knows where they were when they heard. The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. 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." But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . 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. If they have no bread, let them eat from food banks that's Thatcherism, the legacy we are still to bury before it buries us. But these concrete achievements do not wholly explain why she still looms so large, large enough that not one but two current West End plays The Audience and Billy Elliot grant Thatcher a pivotal, if largely unsympathetic, role, whether seen or unseen. 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. For her own part, she was a social conservative and yet today's right for, say, gay couples to marry if they want to fits with one aspect of the Thatcherite vision of personal choice. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn't care if it happened or not. In fact, several countries have adopted these ideas with startlingly successful results; just changing the wording on some forms raised an extra 200m income tax in Britain, while personalised text messages drastically reduced the use of bailiffs to recover court fines. "Labour is stuck because they do not want to carry on the slimming down of the state and devolution of power but nor do they really want to reverse it," said one central Tory figure. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. 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. 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. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? All rights reserved. More insidiously, it fathered amood of tolerated harshness. 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. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. Reagan was received coolly, and the discussion was highly superficial, if only because the British side clearly did not care to engage on substance: meet for a serious discussion with a movie actor and a "Grade B" actor at that? The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die. Modern comedians complain that they don't have personalities, they don't really stand for anything. verbatim and in context. Rather, she was a classic example of a certain kind of conservative woman who believed that all women should pull themselves up just as she had done, conveniently overlooking that not all women are blessed with the privileges that had been available to her, such as a wealthy and supportive husband and domestic help. She lost seven cabinet ministers on the Europe question, a record that permeated the party for years afterwards. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. 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. which revealed a good deal as to her political What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. At a party leaders' meeting in Washington, DC in 1985, Prime Minister Thatcher spent all day in the House of Commons, then boarded Concorde and flew to Washington to participate until late into the evening; she took such policy co-operation very seriously. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. Without it, she would have been nothing. Keith Joseph was her guru. She wanted to win, but did not put much faith in the quick smile. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. Full employment had been ditched in 1976, while Labour had introduced monetary targets and cash limits for Whitehall departments while Denis Healey was at the Treasury. Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture . She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. Beleagured Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher makes pun during the 1981 Conservative Party conference speech: "the lady's not for turning" she says to her crit. 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. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. 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. Privatisation did not feature in the Conservative election campaign, while the tougher approach to trade union reform had only really become evident since the winter of discontent, and even then was a gradual process. Would we like her back? The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. She was immensely brisk. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. . She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. 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. If the Falklands war was the making of Thatcher, then the poll tax was her achilles heel not least in Scotland. A couple of days later on the 11th, Margaret Thatcher the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote an eulogy for Ronald Reagan. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. 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. Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. Thatcher came to power when the economy was approaching a moment of truth after three decades of poor performance relative to other western countries. There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. There are more than 8,000. Hire writer now Order. Interview by Benedict King. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. Far from "smashing the glass ceiling", she was the aberration, the one who got through and then pulled the ladder up right after her. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. But she exploited her luck. There is a paradox. And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. 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. . Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. She also put forward the idea of "a vast . 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. 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. In truth, Thatcher is one of the clearest examples of the fact that a successful woman doesn't always mean a step forward for women. In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. 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. Several strong women on the continent have risen to the top, but thisBritish woman, in Britain of all places, became a phenomenon, first, throughher gender. It isn't sad for anyone else. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. These talks, sometimes joined by the prime minister and run by his aide Rohan Silva, show the restless search for new ideas that still grips the right, one of the least recognised legacies of Margaret Thatcher. 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. Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. (MT gave up public (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". 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. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, 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. The spell of community. When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. All Rights Reserved. But look at this typical difference between her and her imitators: where Cameron has charged into Europe, taking his party out of the influential European People's party of natural allies, making enemies and building no useful coalitions, it was she who signed the Single European Act, understanding its importance for British trade, careful to make allies as well as swinging her handbag. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. They rallied around each other when times were hard. 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. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". We must reduce the inequality that has seen a super-rich elite, openly contemptuous of the flag and family values Thatcher proclaimed, float free from the rest of us. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Such items have an 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. with the European Community when she In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." Thatcher's passing is marked by street parties in Brixton, Belfast, Bristol, Derry, Glasgow and Liverpool, and seething bitterness among the mining families and communities she was allowed (including by scab union and Labour leaders) to destroy. Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. She was always the Spitting Image bully. Hire a Writer. When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a Out! She went to a fee-paying school and to Oxford at her father's expense, gliding easily into the upper echelons of student politics. Margaret Thatcher was not known for her sense of humour. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. It still does. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now?

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