Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. 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!" Today we have four coalmines and around 2,000 miners. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity. 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.". Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. Look inside your own house, at the water coming out of the tap: once a public utility but, after Thatcher, the property of private companies, many foreign-owned. Margaret Thatcher's government defended structured political and religious discrimination and political vetting in the north, legislated for political censorship and institutionalised, to a greater extent than ever before, collusion between British state forces and unionist death squads. Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. Reagan, for one, recognized the importance of Margaret Thatcher's presence as British prime minister, but would caution any discussionpartnerthat Pope John Paul played an equally important role. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. 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. By John Cassidy. 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. 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 The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". 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. 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. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. 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. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. 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. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. 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. April 25, 2020. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. 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. In a twitter of panic, Labour shadow ministers sent out pleas yesterday: "Hoping all Labour supporters will respond with dignity and respect to news of Baroness Thatcher's death." first television interview the following day, euphoric To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. She worked to enhance its corporate power. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Larkin's evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. Accounts vary. But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. It was meant as a term of condemnation, a concise way of arguing that riots in the street or the devastation of a pit village were the inevitable features of this new land that had arisen in the 1980s, a country reshaped by the woman at the top. For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. Oxford CD-ROM explains how the statements were assembled and edited an interviewer "there is no such thing as society" and is 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. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. April 8, 2013. 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.". She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). They rallied around each other when times were hard. of times. 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. Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. 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. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. 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." Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen. 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. I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. 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. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. Arthur Scargill and the miners represented the only opposition to the prime minister and her destructive and divisive values and, after the strike, the way was open for the most aggressive neoliberal policies. Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. This book shows how. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. From her start in politics, Thatcher often attracted sexist critiques for the way she spoke, with many it dubbing her voice "shrill" and "patronizing." Television critic Clive James even compared . I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that More insidiously, it fathered amood of tolerated harshness. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? "Comes here every week to water them flowers." Hire writer now Order. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and Reagan would often hasten to remind those paying tribute to his cold war strategy that it was, in the strictest sense of the term, a team effort. 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.". September 25, 2020. Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word. Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. Look at the cars on the road, none made by the old, nationally-owned British Leyland and only few by the British marques that once dominated but which went the way of much of British industry unable to survive the chill wind of "market forces", another phrase which filled the air back then. The machinery of modern political management polls, consulting, focus groups is deployed mainly to discover what will make aparty and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. As the coalition sets about shrinking the welfare state, it's still embarked on Thatcher's project of rolling back the frontiers of the state, dismantling the settlement that held from 1945 until it unravelled in the 1970s. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. It destroyed the public's power to determine via parliament the services and prices of gas, electricity, telephone. Both were successful women who could play the flirt card when it suited them, but ultimately had little interest in being kind to their own sex; Thatcher especially resented being defined by her gender. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . This is a style whose absence is much missed. 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 dominance of finance in the economy and the failure of bank regulation flowed from her belief that markets should always be left to themselves. It was not interested in a resolution. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. 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. They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. The woman, however, changed. I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. The British inflation was in 1975 up at 24, 11% [] and with the union's constant claim for higher salaries, nobody expected it to drop to a normal level. We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some.

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