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studying Thatcher's speeches . 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. Selling off the family silver Harold Macmillan and later Labour called it, as Margaret Thatcher set about reversing the 1945 nationalisations that had put oil, gas, coal, electricity and an airline as well as a house removal company in public hands. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. 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. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. 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. Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. By 1990 it was transformed. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. 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. 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. Superlatives can be agreed: a remarkable first woman PM; the first winner of three elections in a row; brave; tough; relentless; clever; sleeplessly driven by a self-confident conviction that overawed her enemies. The impact that Hayek's writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. On Saturday, 27 February, he wrote in his diary: "PM getting great press went up to the [Capitol] Hill some of the senators tried to give her a bad time, she put them down firmly and with typical British courtesy.". Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. Handbag. But she also provided great material. Margaret Thatcher had planned to attack Labour's unwillingness to condemn picket-line violence in her 1984 conference speech but changed her mind when an IRA bomb hit The Grand Hotel in Brighton. We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers. The welfare state, with its unemployment and housing benefits and free healthcare, actually protected wages: employers could not force workers to accept low pay or unpaid overtime because of the job's healthcare provision, as they do in the US. 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. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. Without it, she would have been nothing. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. When I think of this memorial, I think of the words of Rupert Brooke, "that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.". She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. But these concrete achievements do not wholly explain why she still looms so large, large enough that not one but two current West End plays The Audience and Billy Elliot grant Thatcher a pivotal, if largely unsympathetic, role, whether seen or unseen. The 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. 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.". For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. Sue Gray used to be my boss. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. April 25, 2020. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. The spell of community. She became deaf to all warning. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. Margaret Thatcher. 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. We have his example. Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. "What's going on there, mate?" This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn't care if it happened or not. 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. There is a paradox. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Everything has its season. Published: Sunday 21st February 2021. 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 . 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. 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 were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. 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. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" of British politics who died Monday at the age of 87, is being lionized as the woman who tilted British domestic and economic policy to the right. Council house sales and advertising campaigns that encouraged the public to buy shares in privatised companies were meant to broaden the appeal of capitalism. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, 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!" Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. 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. Seizing her chariot's reins to drive it on recklessly, they lack her brains, experience and political skill. MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. 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. I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time. A Soviet . Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. Had Jim Callaghan won the 1979 election, he too would have faced the challenge of how to modernise an economy beset by high inflation, weak management and poor industrial relations. Thatcher never kept a diary, but the archive includes rich details of her role in important domestic and world events. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. Thatcher's threat to butcher the mining industry, destroy the fabric of mining communities and in particular the trade union to which miners had a bond of loyalty, was met with the fiercest resistance any government has met in peacetime. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. 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. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time, gave a eulogy to the grieving American people in honor of the late Ronald Reagan on June 11th, 2004. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Keith Joseph was her guru. 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. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. Following several small strokes she announced, in March 2002, that her career as a speechmaker had ended. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. led Michael Heseltine to run against her for the party leadership. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. 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. The Tories triumphed, of course, and lost only two sitting MPs Hamish Gray and the social-security scrounger-bashing Iain Sproat, who vacated his marginal Aberdeen seat and headed for the Scottish Borders, only to suffer defeat there at the hands of the Alliance. Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. declared that she wanted our money back. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? "Maggie Thatcher," he said. 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." Tasteless." But Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate, and the long, substantive lunch seemed to energize both future world leaders. In the current wall-to-wall media welter, I caught the current leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davison MSP, being asked if Thatcher was an electoral asset for her. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. Perhaps she had just come inside. 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. Margaret Thatcher might seem to some like an unlikely pioneer of the need for climate action but, in the late 1980s, she made a series of remarkable speeches and interventions on the subject and . 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. 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. What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. But on their catastrophic economic policy, it's full-speed ahead into the concrete wall. 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. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during Reagan's presidency, and was close with him which History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. Less noted . Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. Only today are we facing the cost. Thatcher's passing is marked by street parties in Brixton, Belfast, Bristol, Derry, Glasgow and Liverpool, and seething bitterness among the mining families and communities she was allowed (including by scab union and Labour leaders) to destroy. It was thoroughly "wet". 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 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. 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. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. 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. "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Hire writer now Order. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. But the choice captures her perfectly. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship it's just not British. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. Animals and Pets Anime Art Cars and Motor Vehicles Crafts and DIY Culture, Race, and Ethnicity Ethics and Philosophy Fashion Food and Drink History Hobbies Law Learning and Education Military Movies Music Place Podcasts and Streamers Politics Programming Reading, Writing, and Literature Religion and Spirituality Science Tabletop Games . Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. Margaret Thatcher is being remembered as the prime minister who remade Britain's economy, the "Iron Lady" who stood up to communism and who fought and won a war in the distant South Atlantic . Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! Few would argue that they have not endured. Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. 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!