Margaret Thatcher. Tasteless." Women aren't always good for other women because the gender of a person matters a lot less than that person's actual beliefs. "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. It made minor savings at best and was, as the . From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. Speaking personally, it was a personal privilege beyond measure to have witnessed and participate in the blossoming of the special ties that continued throughout her entire time in office. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. At its heart must be an active programme to create good jobs and raise living standards. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. Above all, they lack her competence at running the machinery of government. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. 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.". 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. Out! A growing body of research now shows that the quality of social relations is among the most powerful influences on the happiness, health and wellbeing of populations in the rich countries. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her. 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. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. This book shows how. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a In 1982, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a church for 12 days in protest against "police illegality and racism in King's Cross" the area to which many sex workers known as "Thatcher's girls" had travelled from high unemployment areas in the Midlands and the north. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. It was thoroughly "wet". But she also provided great material. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. The government's welfare bill has been swollen by tax credits and housing benefit caused by the labour market reforms and council house sales of the 1980s. Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. . When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. When I started knocking on Highland doors in May 1983, two things struck me more than any other. So look around this kingdom of ours, at a devolved Scotland contemplating independence a state of affairs that owes much to Thatcher's antagonistic relationship with that country. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. 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. That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: "Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her.". M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. At every level of his killing, British agents and agencies had a hand: the leader of the UDA group that carried out the killing was a Special Branch agent, as was the man who confessed to being the gunman, and the man who supplied the gun. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. "What's going on there, mate?" Sue Gray used to be my boss. Getting the record straight. . I was on my own. Thatcher and Reagan went on to facilitate a colossal transfer of wealth from poor to rich, leading to the world economic crash we now witness. rejecting Commission proposals at the Rome European Council with the words The author uses this idea of freedom in her writing to allow the audience to feel and understand the mission of Reagan--"to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism" (6-7). Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. On 30 October 1990 she made the first of the with the European Community when she Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. 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. 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. declared that she wanted our money back. performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the June 30, 1992 - Swearing . speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Certainly, in 1983, it did not occur to me to criticise Harold Macmillan or Alec Douglas-Home on the doorstep as a sure-fire vote turner. Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. But it was the killing of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989 that reveals the depth of the Thatcher government's state collusion policy. "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. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. I was a professional writer. Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . 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. 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. But she became a very effective one. 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. morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. A Soviet . But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. As I see it, and as one who had the pleasure of knowing both, they would recognize the huge opportunity created by the presence of each in the respective national and international policy-making role. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. 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 will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. 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. a new dominance from Brussels". This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. Asked to report on the "state of things" in our country, we could barely see past her. performance at a Press Conference afterwards. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. The cautious tactician was suppressed. Reagan was especially interested in Mrs Thatcher's domestic policy initiatives, and it was quickly established that the foreign policy views ran along parallel lines. She, for one, never underestimated her friend from California, then a state of some 24 million. Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during Reagan's presidency, and was close with him which At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied Less noted . She fervently believed the market would soon repair their loss. Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. An author and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan staked her claim to speechwriting fame as a primary writer for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.Her notable speeches include Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" address, given on the 40 th anniversary of D-Daythe day Allied troops invaded Normandy in World War IIas well as the former president's . Simon Heffer, journalist, historian and friend of Margaret Thatcher, recommends the best books to read to gain an understanding of the United Kingdom's first female prime ministerand explains why she was the most influential British leader of the modern era. The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. 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. I am reminded of this every time the debate comes up about whether more female bylines would reduce sexism in the media. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". Whathappened at the hands of this woman's indifference to sentiment andgood sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who losttheir jobs. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. 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. Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. 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. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated 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. 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. She was able to reach Maggie! This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. 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. She considered European Commission president Jacques Delors a campaigner for . These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. In 1984 Britain had 186 working coalmines and approximately 170,000 coalminers. It was all very well for me to write books. Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. 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. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. It came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. Many are children of the Thatcher age. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to for the disk. 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. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. and She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. 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. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. 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. The woman dubbed as the Iron Lady during her premiership made her last tearful speech as the leader of the country from the doorstep of . A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. By the 1983 election she had sold off only Britoil and some council houses. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. Such items have an they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office. To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. On one visit, our campaign chairman, William J Casey, later director of the CIA, came along, and we had a fruitful meeting at 10 Downing Street. If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide itcannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history. 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. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. A strong, so strong, leader. This has been a terrible labour, she said. 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". 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. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her It led to riots that nobody needed. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society" and is It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. April 25, 2020. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. She defended Ronald Hire a Writer. Without it, she would have been nothing. speaking in March 2002.). But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing ahat. The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. That's history, but what matters to us is her legacy now that her heirs and imitators rule in her wake. For the most part, there's no material there. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that The 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. "Yes and that was one of the many weird things about her," smirked Alexei Sayle. We were wary of this. 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 . Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. Miners were a hardy race of people who faced constant danger in the cause of mining coal but underneath that they were caring, sensitive individuals with a commitment to the communities in which they lived. 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. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she 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. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . 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. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. 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. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's In short, miners believed in society. at The Hague in May 1992. So instead: "I put it to her that we would be saving money." In January 1976, Thatcher delivered a speech at Kensington Town Hall in London, and spoke about the Iron Curtain the political boundary that separated Europe during World War II. Oxford CD-ROM explains how the statements were assembled and edited 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. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union.