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. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. In rich societies such as the UK, what makes most difference to the real quality of our lives is the quality of community life and social interaction. Yet despite the attempts of some columnists to claim otherwise, Thatcher can't really be seen as "a warrior in the sex war", let alone as "the ultimate women's libber". April 8, 2013. They married the personality and belief to action. She may have got it slightly wrong. But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? 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. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. No single mother raising children was to be called "workless", skipping meals to feed them and forced to ditch them to submit to "workfare" or a starvation wage. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? By John Cassidy. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. I was just behind her at the civic museum in Dubrovnik when the local guide explained a model showing the elaborate system of ancient wells and tunnels that had provided the city with fresh water no matter how fierce the siege. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. So what caused this great divide, with one side a fountain of fresh ideas and the other struggling for new inspiration? It's telling that Tony Blair's domestic legacy amounts to two responses to Thatcherism: forcing Labour to accept it and then compensating for the damage the Tories had wreaked through sustained underinvestment in the public realm. 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. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. It isn't sad for anyone else. History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. Thatcher's reign helped to inspire alternative comedy by creating a generation so bereft of hope that they started putting on gigs just for the sake of something to do. No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. 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. The latest pit to close, Maltby in Yorkshire, still has a death and general purpose fund to help fellow miners and their families in times of hardship. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. 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. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office. As the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher, I was given special permission by the Cabinet Secretary to see government papers not yet released to the public.For . Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. But as weand others (including Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers) have shown, wider income differences reduce social mobility and make it harder for people with poorer backgrounds to do so. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). 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. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . Margaret Thatcher. I was a professional writer. Margaret Flowers is a leading activist, doctor, teacher, and co-founder of PopularResistance.org, a website that aims to inform and inspire grassroots movements around the world. But awoman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. Miners had always known that eventually any of the colleries would close and were always prepared to accept that as a fact of life and find employment somewhere else within the industry, but Thatcher's attack was wholesale. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. This is a style whose absence is much missed. It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders. Back when we called her Maggie, when it seemed she would have her wish and "go on and on" in ruling the country, her opponents would lament some new step towards social ruin with the withering, two-word verdict: "Thatcher's Britain.". It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. It never was. The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.". At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. "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. Sayle recorded the song Get Me Mrs Thatcher, but says that in general he felt Thatcher jokes were a bit too easy, although he still shudders at the memory of a "wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s". For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. She made her remarks There are many reasons for this. wrong with politics? The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. The poll-tax rioters. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot (20 Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. 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. The task of representing the White House usually was the role of the vice-president, but in this special case, the Reagans and the Bushes both attended. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one Just look around. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought toannihilate. 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. She added layers of her own to this intimacy, directing the creation of a single European market that surrendered important national powers to the collective. Opponents and supporters of Margaret Thatcher will never agree about the value of her legacy, but as for her importance, her hypnotic hold on us, they are bound to find common ground. To project the ideas of strength and . Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. 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. No sign they learned from her that markets don't move in to fill the gaps when the state is rolled back not then, not now. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. 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. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. 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. After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle announced that White They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. And the miners. Though she recognised the dangers of global warming, Thatcher's industrial and economic policies prioritised economic growth. But Thatcher was still cautious. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! The dockers. Thatcher's title is Baroness. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. Its strategies included the shallow and ineffectual 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement which was about creating a political alliance involving the Dublin establishment, the SDLP and the British to defeat Irish republicanism. They are a more energetic and impressive group than their predecessors, often with experience outside politics that makes them impatient and independent-minded. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. 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. It was thoroughly "wet". The speakers form a rollcall of the globe's most interesting thinkers: Amartya Sen, the Nobel-winning Indian economist; Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologist and another Nobel winner; and Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, who focused on land rights for the poor. Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. The economic crisis that Britain faced had been created not by the working class itself, these wholesome people that Sir Keith remembered from his vac weeks in Barnsley, but by a working-class leadership that was determined to bring the whole system crashing down. A friend of South African apartheid and mass murderers from Kissinger and Pinochet to the Khmer Rouge after they had killed two million Cambodians she was a zealous saleswoman for the arms industry. 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. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just another one bites the dust " This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. But this didn't come without a price. She became harder than hard. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave Tasteless." One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. 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 There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. 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. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. 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. Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. To demand that all of that be ignored in the face of one-sided requiems to her nobility and greatness is a bit bullying and tyrannical, not to mention warped. 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. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . She was not a writer. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. Across Yorkshire or south Wales, Kent or Nottinghamshire, there are villages that have never recovered from the closure of coal mines, ordered by a Thatcher who ruled there was no place for pits that were not "economically viable", regardless of the social consequences. Without the Falklands/Malvinas war, which exploited nationalism (as Argentinian dictator Galtieri did) and which Labour would not oppose, she would never have been re-elected in 1983. Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. The left misleads us and maybe itself when it says that Thatcher's policies, extended by New Labour and then by the coalition, have failed. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? Only today are we facing the cost. 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. defended Ronald Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. The Independent has the story. In 1976 it still did not help and in the same year they had to take a loan in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [] . She went to a fee-paying school and to Oxford at her father's expense, gliding easily into the upper echelons of student politics. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. ", This was the great leader in her favourite pose as Samuel Smiles: human beings didn't need to be helped they needed to help themselves. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. The Bruges speech was given by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the College of Europe at the Belfry of Bruges, Belgium, on 20 September 1988.Thatcher was opposed to any moves to transition the European Economic Community (EEC) into a federal Europe that would take powers away from its members. 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. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. She made her maiden Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship it's just not British. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. Rishi Sunak 20 July 2022 9:30pm. "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. But now the history was what mattered. So instead: "I put it to her that we would be saving money." This was hardly the first or even the worst example of a dig at Thatcher tinged so needlessly with sexism. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. And in 1983, for the first time, children born in Britain to non-British parents were denied automatic citizenship, fostering further racism and discrimination in immigration policy. 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's Spitting Image puppet was different from the others; while other characters, such as Ronald Reagan and the pope, were exaggerated into fantasy versions of themselves, the rubber Maggie was just like the one who appeared on the news a stern, cold, matronly figure who had a slightly oedipal relationship with her cabinet. 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. In the 2004 eulogy in honor of the late president, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher uses a series of rhetorical devices such as parallelism, repetition, and ethos to convey the message in which Reagan was much more than an excellent president. But growth rates in the decades since her period in office have been lower than during those that preceded her; nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth. . 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. 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. We are all on our own. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. rejecting Commission proposals at the Rome European Council with the words I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. During the speech, . 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. Yet, as the heated benefits debate showed last week, Labour is trapped by history bereft of fresh ideas and, when tentatively offering proposals, strangled by the most stifling conservatism. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. Thatcher never kept a diary, but the archive includes rich details of her role in important domestic and world events. This book shows how. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. Scotland was her mission impossible.
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