Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. Larkin's evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". At its heart must be an active programme to create good jobs and raise living standards. All Rights Reserved. Sent Bobby Sands to an Irish hero's grave without a blink. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . Margaret Thatcher's 1980 speech was written by playwright Ronnie Miller, and Julia recalls that the night before delivering the speech she had a huge row with him about the content. Thatcher exposed the sharp edges of class division in Britain and the strike of 1984/5 was as much a clash of values as it was about pit closures. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. 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. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. 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. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. 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. Margaret Thatcher's Climate Change Of Heart | HuffPost Impact Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). 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. The result . Margaret Thatcher. 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. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. 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 Margaret Thatcher speech that was buried by the Brighton bomb Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during Reagan's presidency, and was close with him which The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. How many Oscars does Meryl Streep have? - sportskeeda.com Scotland was her mission impossible. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers. 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. It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. More than once the view was advanced that it was a pity the IRA had not succeeded in their ultimate objective when they bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. She was immensely brisk. Perhaps Labour would benefit from another defeat, given the danger of taking power unprepared and turning into a zombie government, like the tragedy unfurling in France. Indeed, many of the policy innovations associated with Thatcher had already been pioneered by her predecessor. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. She also put forward the idea of "a vast . Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) the British Embassy in Paris and stated This is not the Highland way. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? (Interestingly, Currie also recalled that when she approached Thatcher in 1988 to get approval for the world's first national breast-screening programme, she tried to appeal to the PM initially "as a woman" but that swiftly proved unsuccessful. The centralised statism that dominated politics for much of the 20th century, given its last pathetic gasp under the profligate government of Gordon Brown, ultimately failed the poor while proving financially unsustainable and unsuited to modern times. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per (MT gave up public She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. 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". Maybe it was the sound of the estuary pronunciation robbing her of her aspirational airs, a prototype of the Bouquet/Bucket joke. . Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. The news last week that they are instead considering cutting or freezing the minimum wage surely undermines any pretence that the government is acting either coherently or in the public interest. Scotsman Obituaries: Bernard Ingham, press secretary who ensured When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. As far as her supporters are concerned, this radical transformation worked. International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. Police charges against picketing union printers in Wapping enabled the Murdoch empire to flourish, ensuring their power and hers. 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. She defended Ronald But she also provided great material. A meeting in Downing Street had left the Pakistan leader besotted with the older woman's wisdom and generosity: '"I tell you, she's such a kind person.". An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. The Man Whose Powerful Critique of Socialism Influenced Margaret Thatcher In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. Maggie! "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. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. On 30 October 1990 she made the first of the Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. Great speeches: Margaret Thatcher | World | The Guardian 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. 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 played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. The time was 1973. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . 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. There were sporadic resurrections. 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. Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. But on their catastrophic economic policy, it's full-speed ahead into the concrete wall. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . 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. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. 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. 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. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. She certainly was divisive, bisecting the country politically and geographically: hard-hit regions in the north of England, Wales and Scotland may be notably less civil in their farewells. 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. Tributes paid as Sir Bernard Ingham dies, aged 90 - PressReader On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly about the environment and climate change. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. 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. Union in a speech Only today are we facing the cost. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. 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. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that . As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. This is the area where we need to make progress not just in restoring strong local government, but in understanding that democracy means more than a Westminster vote. 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. "Maggie! British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. By the 1983 election she had sold off only Britoil and some council houses. She would not have been half the . Tasteless." Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. Nobody, at least that I know of, objected to that observation on the ground that it was disrespectful to the ability of the Chavez family to mourn in peace. She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. verbatim and in context. 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. 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. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. It was a Charles I moment in British history. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. It led to riots that nobody needed. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. 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. For those miners and their families to be referred to as the "enemy within" by Thatcher was something they would never forgive and, if there is rejoicing at her death in those communities she set out to destroy, it can only be understood against this background. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. In the 2011 biographical drama film "The Iron Lady," Meryl Streep plays the role of Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. In 2009, Boris Johnson lamented that Thatcher had become "a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor.". This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. talked of "Victorian Values". 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. I am reminded of this every time the debate comes up about whether more female bylines would reduce sexism in the media. In this eulogy, Thatcher uses rhetorical strategies to convince her readers into believing what she states. Promises. Women aren't always good for other women because the gender of a person matters a lot less than that person's actual beliefs. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. 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. Was it cruelty? And the single mums. Climate, freedom and denial: What "Green Thatcherism" teaches us today The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. This has been a terrible labour, she said. speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. 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. Few would argue that they have not endured. . Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. 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. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. 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 . They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". If the Falklands war was the making of Thatcher, then the poll tax was her achilles heel not least in Scotland. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. 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 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. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of Heath took us into Europe, and a referendum in spring 1975 confirmed national approval for the move. The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. The Independent has the story. They are a more energetic and impressive group than their predecessors, often with experience outside politics that makes them impatient and independent-minded. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. 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. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not 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.
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