'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. All rights reserved. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. She was always the Spitting Image bully. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. her maiden She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. Faced down trade union leaders after her early years apprentice years, when Jim Callaghan's Britain was falling apart in which the commonest fear was that the little lady would not be able to deal with them across the table. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. Alexei Sayle blames Twitter and the "multiplicity of voices" in the modern world. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that And the miners. Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. Reagan, for one, recognized the importance of Margaret Thatcher's presence as British prime minister, but would caution any discussionpartnerthat Pope John Paul played an equally important role. Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. at The Hague in May 1992. Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising November). The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. The preface to the for the disk. ", 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. And that made it easy to mock her. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. But as weand others (including Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers) have shown, wider income differences reduce social mobility and make it harder for people with poorer backgrounds to do so. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. This, too, we still live with. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. From 1987 to 1988, he was a senior policy writer and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.. O'Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio . Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. Without it, she would have been nothing. Thank you, too, Margaret. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. . Rishi Sunak 20 July 2022 9:30pm. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. 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. She was catapulted into the Conservative leadership by a small group of ideologues centred around a thinktank, determined to roll back the statist ideas that dominated Britain after the postwar Attlee government. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. 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. While some remember her as a national saviour, others only see her ruthless demolition of flailing state-owned industries. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. 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. September 25, 2020. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. 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. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. 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. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. Union in a speech What will not be forgotten? "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries. 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. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. speech in the House of Commons, her North sea oil was squandered when it should have seeded new industries. I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" Steel or Thomas why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. "Maggie! making her big speech the following day as scheduled. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising She was 87. departing Downing Street on 28 November. Such items have an At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. 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. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. A strong pound crippled exports and emptied factories. MT prayed on the She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Had pollsters and the 24/7 media forced leaders to follow opinion, not lead it? Promises. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. But awoman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) 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. The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference Plus there's the fact that comedy is now a big business, and there's less money in sharp satire than gentle observation. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. In 1990 Thatcher authorised the then British secretary of state Peter Brooke to reopen back-channel negotiations with republicans. Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. 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. In her 1982 party conference speech, Margaret Thatcher offered a prediction for the future: "How absurd it will seem in a few years' time that the state ran Pickfords removals and Gleneagles Hotel." More insidiously, it fathered amood of tolerated harshness. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In short, miners believed in society. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. There are still some great comics doing political material, with Mark Steel and Mark Thomas flying the flag of alternative comedy, while people such as Josie Long and Chris Coltrane find the funny in activism. the British Embassy in Paris and stated 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. She would not have been half the . Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. Given the global economic crisis, rampant corporate greed and growing inequality, this should be a time of great ferment, with endless policy proposals bubbling up to challenge the post-Thatcher consensus at a time of immense and unsettling change. The Big Bang of City deregulation, the Tell Sid scramble for buying and selling shares, the sense that money is the highest value, wealth the greatest sign of worth all these were hallmarks of the Thatcher era in its mid-80s pomp. . It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. 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 . successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. 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. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. A Soviet . In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. 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. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. While she spoke of his example as a beacon, she knew very well that she was an important component of what is often attributed solely to him, and in the first instance "winning" the cold war. In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. It isn't sad for anyone else. This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. There was, for example, the time in the late 1970s when, as Opposition Leader, she almost succeeded in censoring the one half-decent joke in a key campaign speech. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. 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. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. But Thatcher was a naturally, perhaps incurably, divisive figure. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. The result . On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest. The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. For the most part, it has not been undone. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. 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.". But Labour is no less in thrall. A massive programme of social housing would be a good place to start, stimulating the economy. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. Nelson travelled to South Africa where he helped negotiate a deal that saw the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance acquire AK-47 automatic rifles, pistols, grenades, and RPG rocket launchers in late 1987 or early 1988. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. 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. (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. On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. Arguably, it was not the sale of council houses that was the problem, but the failure to replace the stock and maintain a sufficient supply of affordable homes. No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. 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. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. To the victors we saycongratulations. To Britons of my generation, she . Margaret Thatcher has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings. deeply felt eulogy, filmed in advance and relayed by video link to screens in the National Cathedral in Washington. . She defended Ronald The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. This speech was delivered soon after her taking office in 1979. This was a historic step, and resulted in further reinforcing the US-UK alliance. There had been Churchill and his defiance; there had been Kipling and his If; there had been her father in his grocer's shop in Grantham. Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. This was most evident in the shooting dead of three unarmed IRA activists in Gibraltar in March 1988. As a result, Labour authorities in eight or so British cities have set up fairness commissions to reduce income differences locally. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. 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. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. Mikhail Gorbachev, for one, learned the hard way. She was able to reach The last time I met her was after all this was over. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s.

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