Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. ", 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. speaking in March 2002.). 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%. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. 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 . It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. 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. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she The core of this site is a massive database of MT's public statements of all kinds across the years (speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc), searchable by date, subject, importance, and keyword. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. All can agree that Margaret Thatcher changed the heart of British politics more than any politician since Clement Attlee. 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. Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful . You can get the Turnitin report from the writer on request along with the final deliverable. But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. However, for almost a decade Sinn Fin had been patently trying to build a peace process and unfolding events on the world stage including the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and the release of Mandela were evidence that governments, and apparently intractable situations, could change. I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. She made one How dare her apologists and beneficiaries of her legacy refer to trade unions like the NUM as "corrupt" in the face of their bonuses and tax cuts! Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. She, for one, never underestimated her friend from California, then a state of some 24 million. Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. She made her remarks Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during Reagan's presidency, and was close with him which There is a paradox. She lost seven cabinet ministers on the Europe question, a record that permeated the party for years afterwards. But the sense of community evaporated. Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. These talks, sometimes joined by the prime minister and run by his aide Rohan Silva, show the restless search for new ideas that still grips the right, one of the least recognised legacies of Margaret Thatcher. She was always the Spitting Image bully. . 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. But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing ahat. 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 . They rallied around each other when times were hard. deeply felt eulogy, filmed in advance and relayed by video link to screens in the National Cathedral in Washington. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. 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.". 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. He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. 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." Far from "smashing the glass ceiling", she was the aberration, the one who got through and then pulled the ladder up right after her. 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. This has been a terrible labour, she said. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. We had had a strange relationship. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. 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. When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. Gloves. Absurd or not, it does indeed seem alien not least to those born in the 1980s, the generation we shall always call Thatcher's children. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. 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. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? Weakening the power of trade unions was not only essential to her project, but several studies suggest that their continued weakness may be an important part of the reason why inequality has not declined in the intervening decades. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office. The challenge for the left is to fashion new and genuinely progressive policies in an age of austerity, when more money is not the answer to any question. Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. Throw the Lib Dems into the mix and it becomes highly combustible. But Labour is no less in thrall. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly about the environment and climate change. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". Any attempts at revisionism do no favours to her, women or feminism. 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. What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. The items stored in this section of the site are texts, but many of the most important statements are also available in audio or video form in the separate Multimedia section. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. 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.". 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. But she exploited her luck. It was seen for what it was, nothing to do with economics, but purely an attempt to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers by wiping out the entire industry. They built and provided their own welfare facilities and, well before today's welfare state was built, miners created their own welfare systems to alleviate hardship. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." There are many reasons for this. Many are children of the Thatcher age. ROBIN HARRIS worked for the Conservative Party from 1978, and increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. 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. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. In this eulogy, Thatcher uses rhetorical strategies to convince her readers into believing what she states. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, replied But Thatcher was still cautious. That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. Words. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. "No, no, no". LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. In 1990 Thatcher authorised the then British secretary of state Peter Brooke to reopen back-channel negotiations with republicans. 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. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. North sea oil was squandered when it should have seeded new industries. The last time I met her was after all this was over. All rights reserved. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. The woman, however, changed. We still live in the land Margaret built. Her Irish policy failed miserably. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. declared that she wanted our money back, invited the Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. I will know that we have finally broken from the kind of capitalism that she championed and which died in 2008 when we see workers elected on to company boards. Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric After being carried through the streets of London in a flag-draped coffin aboard a gun carriage, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was laid to rest this . There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . In 1980, I made several fast round trips to London, Paris and Bonn, and, on each occasion, had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Thatcher. In 1976 it still did not help and in the same year they had to take a loan in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [] . If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". 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. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. November). Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. 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. Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. she We have his example. the British Embassy in Paris and stated Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. Only today are we facing the cost. 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. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. 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!" They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. I am reminded of this every time the debate comes up about whether more female bylines would reduce sexism in the media. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom's first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. . 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. History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries. Hats. We liked disliking her. TRIBUTES were paid last night to Sir Bernard Ingham, the longstanding press secretary to Margaret Thatcher and a columnist in The Yorkshire Post until just a few weeks ago. Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM, 1945-90, edited Christopher Real Analysis Solved Problems, Synthesis Essay Freedom Of Speech, Photography Dissertation Titles, Reflective Essay Writers Service Usa, Sample Of The Resume 4423 . It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. 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. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. 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. March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. By 1990 it was transformed. M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. June 5, 1992 - Is named a life peer on the Queen's honor list. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? But look at this typical difference between her and her imitators: where Cameron has charged into Europe, taking his party out of the influential European People's party of natural allies, making enemies and building no useful coalitions, it was she who signed the Single European Act, understanding its importance for British trade, careful to make allies as well as swinging her handbag. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. At its best, that has meant a mood of freedom and choice that has made these islands a brighter, less drab place than they once were. We watched as her high heels went click-click-click across the stones of the Acropolis and the cement floors of Tito's steel mills. Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture . 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. This was a historic step, and resulted in further reinforcing the US-UK alliance. The authors show just how much . 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). 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. Modern comedians complain that they don't have personalities, they don't really stand for anything. "The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Until her final poll-tax hubris, she knew when swerving was the better part of valour and despite that famous one-liner, she was sometimes for turning. "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. And the miners. To project the ideas of strength and . If you have a . The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. 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. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. Hire writer now Order. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. 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. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. 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. 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. 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. Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". "We have not recommended by Simon Heffer. 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. Sue Gray used to be my boss. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. 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. But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". be a nation in retreat". You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. 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. 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. A distinction is often made between two traditions of British Conservative thought: the paternalist "one nation/middle way" tradition, and the more libertarian one that is associated with Margaret Thatcher. ", 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. Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. 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. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. cent of cases. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. 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. It is full of insights into a neglected aspect of how Thatcher came to dominate British politics." (Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield, UK) "A fascinating insight into the world of speech writing. Without it, she would have been nothing. It still does. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. Maggie! These developments set a benchmark. be a nation in retreat". For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. The former reporter, who was 90, died with his family around him yesterday lunchtime, a statement said. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. 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. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. 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. Instead, her Big Bang blew the roof off City profits and property booms filled the gap where productive industry should have sprouted. 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. Today's Tories walk in Thatcher's footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. 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.