The great contradiction in her politics was that someone who yearned for the certainties of small-town shopkeeper economics helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance that is still an ironic positive legacy of her time in power. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. Margaret Thatcher Essay Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. 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. Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable The preface to the The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. Here is a selection of the best writing from commentators, politicians and journalists on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in power - and on her continuing impact in the time following her downfall, as figures from across the political spectrum examine the legacy of one of the most important political figures from the last half-century, this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama, key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War, publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq, the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez, the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper, Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers, nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth, decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality, intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy, Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s, "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. "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. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. Alamat kami. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. 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. Contrary to an increasingly common belief, "a woman who is successful" is not synonymous with "a feminist". Margaret Thatcher's Climate Change Of Heart | HuffPost Impact Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful Well, everything really, even her name. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to recommended by Simon Heffer. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. defended Ronald Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. But perhaps her greatest legacy was New Labour. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. 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. 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. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . 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. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective. 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. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. April 25, 2020. "Yes and that was one of the many weird things about her," smirked Alexei Sayle. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. Above all, they lack her competence at running the machinery of government. Any such objections would have been invalid. 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. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. She describes Reagan as her friend and continues to narrate his good acts in America during his presidency. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. Selling off the family silver Harold Macmillan and later Labour called it, as Margaret Thatcher set about reversing the 1945 nationalisations that had put oil, gas, coal, electricity and an airline as well as a house removal company in public hands. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. Many hated her. She was able to reach Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain | The New Yorker Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. 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. Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. 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. It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. By the 1983 election she had sold off only Britoil and some council houses. When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. Seizing her chariot's reins to drive it on recklessly, they lack her brains, experience and political skill. All rights reserved. As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? MT prayed on the But the left also needs to look beyond the turbulent events in Europe to appreciate the speed of global change and the complications this creates for welfare-laden economies: the dynamos and innovators are increasingly found in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than France, Germany and Spain. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. 1971 was the year of Ted Heath's Conservative government, which was trying to make huge savings to the budget. Toastmasters International -Famous Speechwriters In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". 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. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. We had had a strange relationship. Thatcher is remembered for her achievements, but more for a presence, which was wrapped up with being a woman. MT gave her first It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. 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. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. These include, "We have to show them that we're better than they are", and "Women can get into corners that men can't reach!" November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. During the speech, . But on their catastrophic economic policy, it's full-speed ahead into the concrete wall. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. first television interview the following day, euphoric Secondly, the balance of power in industrial relations was shifted decisively in favour of employers. Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. This zest for ideas was boosted by the 2010 intake, which comprises just under half the parliamentary party. 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. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." She became deaf to all warning. Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. She may have got it slightly wrong. Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. The last remnants of the postwar consensus were swept away in the ensuing decade a period that saw the crushing of the trade unions, the Big Bang in the City, council house sales, the privatisation of large chunks of industry, the encouragement of inward investment, tax cuts, attempts to roll back the state, a deep manufacturing recession, a boom in North Sea oil production, and support for the creation of a single market in Europe. She lost seven cabinet ministers on the Europe question, a record that permeated the party for years afterwards. Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. They married the personality and belief to action. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. performance at a Press Conference afterwards. By the close of her premiership, he was probably the most trusted member of her political team at Downing Street, and he left Number Ten with her. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. 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." 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. Maggie! Was it cruelty? Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. The Iron Lady had a green thumband a surprisingly green philosophy. The US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. After being carried through the streets of London in a flag-draped coffin aboard a gun carriage, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was laid to rest this . 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. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him a third of the country, according to some polls a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. That bonuses and top incomes continue to rise while the incomes of the rest of the population struggle to keep up with inflation tells us that what we needed was legislation to ensure employee representation on company boards and remuneration committees as many of our European partners have. Indeed a person with achemistry that repelled almost all thesignificant males in Edward Heath's cabinet who could never become theparty leader. The battle with the miners and leftwing councils lay ahead, as did the trauma of an IRA assassination bid. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. 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. Margaret Thatcher was not known for her sense of humour. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. 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? The Crown: How Margaret Thatcher Was Removed from Power in 1990 - ELLE Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. verbatim and in context. From 1987 to 1988, he was a senior policy writer and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.. O'Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio . Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. Margaret Thatcher climbs over a house : r/funny Margaret Thatcher's environmental record: She was a climate hawk. outlook at the time. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. a new dominance from Brussels". For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. departing Downing Street on 28 November. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. Gloves. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. And then, perversely, would come the throwaway, sign-off remark to the effect of: "At least you know where you stand with Maggie she hates us and we hate her.". Chavez was indeed a divisive and controversial figure, and it would have been reckless to conceal that fact out of some misplaced deference to the grief of his family and supporters. 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. Climate, freedom and denial: What "Green Thatcherism" teaches us today Thatcher jokes were big business, from Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, to Harry Enfield's satire of Thatcher's children with his Loadsamoney character. Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Would we like her back? On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough If You Want Anything Said Ask a Man, Want Anything Done Ask a Woman There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. 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. 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. 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. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. Margaret Thatcher: Foreign Policy of Great Britain | Speech-Guru They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister 1979-1990 - ThoughtCo Getting the record straight. The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Few would argue that they have not endured. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." 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. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. Peggy Noonan. It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. to secure international action to repair the damaged ozone layer. From the invention of the term "sado-monetarism" through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation's masochistic imagination. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. 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 . It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. It was thoroughly "wet". It came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. Any attempts at revisionism do no favours to her, women or feminism. Interview by Benedict King. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. So it suggests the anachronistic and unaffordable return to a contributory welfare system, while opposing the further opening up of education and health provision; some even float the renationalisation of railways. Tributes paid as Sir Bernard Ingham dies, aged 90 - PressReader And the single mums. This does lead to divisions. The price we all continue to pay for Thatcherite policies is to live in a less cohesive and more antisocial society, in which community life is weaker, people feel less able to trust each other and fewer of those in government have the experience and compassion to represent or understand the vast majority. 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." The items stored in this section of the site are texts, but many of the most important statements are also available in audio or video form in the separate Multimedia section. There had been Churchill and his defiance; there had been Kipling and his If; there had been her father in his grocer's shop in Grantham. Though she recognised the dangers of global warming, Thatcher's industrial and economic policies prioritised economic growth. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. Today's Tories walk in Thatcher's footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy. What Is Wrong With Margaret Thatcher's Voice On 'The Crown - Esquire But Thatcher was still cautious. She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world. 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. Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. 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. 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. She defended Ronald Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! They're not Thatcher. The novel may thrive in adversity and it was a general sense of dismay at the new world she was showing us that lured many writers into opposition.