She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. Many hated her. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. one Instead, her Big Bang blew the roof off City profits and property booms filled the gap where productive industry should have sprouted. 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! And he would credit the contribution of Helmut Kohl, who rose to power in Germany in part because of the influence of Thatcher and Reagan. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. 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. No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. 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. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's Action. 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%. It was a Charles I moment in British history. first television interview the following day, euphoric November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. Emery Evans . Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. 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. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. 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. in a statement the following morning (22 November), hours before she By the 1983 election she had sold off only Britoil and some council houses. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. 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. September 25, 2020. performance at a Press Conference afterwards. defended Ronald Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. . Nor, contrary to myth, did Thatcherism emerge fully formed in May 1979. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. All rights reserved. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. The spell of community. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. Firstly, control of inflation rather than the pursuit of full employment was the centrepiece of macro economic strategy. On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave 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 . Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren't about getting the leader liked. Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. There were sporadic resurrections. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. The financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. That's because, 23 years after she was ejected from Downing Street by her own party in a move whose psychic wounds linger on, the country we live in remains Thatcher's Britain. She was a radical conservative, known for dismantling nationalized industries and social services, weakening union power.She was also the first incumbent prime minister in the UK removed on a vote of their own party. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. 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. They rallied around each other when times were hard. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. The result . For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. This was her last important public statement. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. There are more than 8,000. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. Just look around. 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. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. 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. Real Analysis Solved Problems, Synthesis Essay Freedom Of Speech, Photography Dissertation Titles, Reflective Essay Writers Service Usa, Sample Of The Resume 4423 . She was among the first Western leaders to From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. departing Downing Street on 28 November. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. "You would see MPs who came into any politics after Ihad and who were no better than me being promoted over my head," said Currie this week. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. Of course, it's in politics that the shadow looms most clearly. Tasteless." They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Above all, they lack her competence at running the machinery of government. Union in a speech My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. 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. One of the few direct hits scored in the modern era was when Alex Ross and James Herring remixed Nick Clegg's bizarre "I'm sorry" speech and turned it into a hilarious R&B tune. Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness? She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. Its strategies included the shallow and ineffectual 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement which was about creating a political alliance involving the Dublin establishment, the SDLP and the British to defeat Irish republicanism. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. For her own part, she was a social conservative and yet today's right for, say, gay couples to marry if they want to fits with one aspect of the Thatcherite vision of personal choice. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. 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. 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. . Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. Thatcher came to personify those ready to push anyone aside to gain power in a man's world and strengthen that world with their ambition. After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. 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. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. 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. There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. 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". 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. Lady Thatcher, you honor us by coming to the site of Sir Winston's pivotal speech, an event Westminster College has immortalized with the beautiful Winston Churchill Memorial. After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". ", This was the great leader in her favourite pose as Samuel Smiles: human beings didn't need to be helped they needed to help themselves. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. 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. The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. There is a paradox. announced that White Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. This does lead to divisions. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. Getting the record straight. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. Margaret Thatcher's landmark Bruges speech about the future of Europe was never intended to push the UK towards the exit, the man who wrote it says. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. 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 . Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. She was 87. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. As Danny Dorling says in his 2004 study of the rise in violence: "Those who perpetrated the social violence that was done to the lives of young men starting some 20 years ago [the mid-80s] are the prime suspects for most of the murders in Britain." She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. 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. What will not be forgotten? If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. Was it cruelty? You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office. Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. . She made one The latest pit to close, Maltby in Yorkshire, still has a death and general purpose fund to help fellow miners and their families in times of hardship. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated 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. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. 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.". Many of today's more controversial benefits, such as disability, date back to the 80s. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to It's interesting, though, that even when comedians try to be political, they can never really land a punch on David Cameron, Nick Clegg or George Osborne. in his defence during the IranContra affair, told That did the trick.). British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." The Iron Lady had a green thumband a surprisingly green philosophy. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and 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. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. decision to resign. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan.

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