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. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. In his usual slightly dishevelled style, he went to Downing Street to discuss his pioneering concepts of behavioural economics and attempts to implement them under Barack Obama. This speech was delivered soon after her taking office in 1979. Thank you, too, Margaret. A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. ", This attitude that men are fun but dumb, women are smart but strident, a view of the sexes that seems to come straight out of a Judd Apatow film led to various quotes of hers that some like to twist into proof that Thatcher was an unwitting feminist. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. 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. As far as her supporters are concerned, this radical transformation worked. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders.
Scotsman Obituaries: Bernard Ingham, press secretary who ensured Accounts vary.
Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable Farewelling Baroness Margaret Thatcher in a proper fashion is a difficult task: she left such a deep imprint upon the world that assessing its importance demands volumes analyzing her beliefs and paying proper tribute. This is what we mean by the Thatcher revolution, imposing on Britain, for better or for worse, some of the liberalisation that the major continental economies know,20 years later, they still need. And he would credit the contribution of Helmut Kohl, who rose to power in Germany in part because of the influence of Thatcher and Reagan. defended Ronald Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. 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. In the prime Thatcher years they required a severity of will to carry through that would now, if called on, bewrapped in so many cycles of deluding spin as to persuade us it hadn't really happened. 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%. 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. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." 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. 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. She went to a fee-paying school and to Oxford at her father's expense, gliding easily into the upper echelons of student politics. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. The preface to the The tragic upshot has been the steep erosion of wages for the powerless bottom half, as income, wealth and property is sucked up to the top. ", 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. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. .
The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher She was able to reach 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. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. She may have got it slightly wrong. 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. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role.
The Messed Up Truth About Margaret Thatcher - Grunge.com She was always the Spitting Image bully. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. 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. Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. Margaret Thatcher's landmark Bruges speech about the future of Europe was never intended to push the UK towards the exit, the man who wrote it says. She worked to enhance its corporate power. Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. By 1990 it was transformed. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. Larkin's evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. 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. Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid.
Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae | Best Writing Service April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. 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. There is now, however, an opportunity to commit to a new politics that learns lessons from her ambition yet undoes the damage and focuses on reconstruction. She would not have been half the . Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. 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. Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. So instead: "I put it to her that we would be saving money." Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world.
Margaret Thatcher 'the Lady's not for turning' - YouTube But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. 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". 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. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez: "To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.". But now the history was what mattered. "Maggie! making her big speech the following day as scheduled.
The Thatcher Papers - Churchill Archives Centre She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. "We have not She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. But if today's Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow's TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. Rishi Sunak 20 July 2022 9:30pm. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. She was a radical conservative, known for dismantling nationalized industries and social services, weakening union power.She was also the first incumbent prime minister in the UK removed on a vote of their own party. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. She mesmerised us. Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. Tasteless." verbatim and in context. LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. first television interview the following day, euphoric to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. 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. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and and 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. 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. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. The credit boom both here and in the USA may have gone against her Grantham roots but was an equally inevitable result of deregulation and the temptation of easy loans for people hungry to improve living standards. In the current wall-to-wall media welter, I caught the current leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davison MSP, being asked if Thatcher was an electoral asset for her. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. Meryl Streep's depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. "What's going on there, mate?" She forced us to decide what was truly important. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. She became harder than hard. 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. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. It was a visit warmly welcomed by President Reagan, with a resplendent state nner on the first evening. 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. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. But awoman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.".
Margaret Thatcher's environmental record: She was a climate hawk. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
BBC ON THIS DAY | 28 | 1990: Tearful farewell from Iron Lady 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 came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. On 30 October 1990 she made the first of the She was among the first Western leaders to At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, For the most part, there's no material there. 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. Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? Many hated her. Words.
Margaret Thatcher Eulogy Rhetorical Analysis - Peachy Essay Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality.
Speeches, interviews & other statements - Margaret Thatcher The best books on Margaret Thatcher - Five Books "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. The fact is that if both sides removed their ideological blinkers, as Thatcher, remarkably perhaps, managed to do, then her trilogy of speeches in the late 1980s still offer some of the best and . Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful 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. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, 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. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . Throw the Lib Dems into the mix and it becomes highly combustible. Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' When the mourners gather for Baroness Thatcher's funeral tomorrow, one important figure from her political past will be . Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. This was hardly the first or even the worst example of a dig at Thatcher tinged so needlessly with sexism.
Sue Gray has shown the dangers of thinking officials are more ethical be a nation in retreat". Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition.
Great speeches: Margaret Thatcher | World | The Guardian When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. Much of any leader's record is unremarkable dross, and Thatcher was no exception. From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. 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 . She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". Without it, she would have been nothing. So we agreed to reactivate the back channel.