Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. 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. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per The cautious tactician was suppressed. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. But growth rates in the decades since her period in office have been lower than during those that preceded her; nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth. There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. which revealed a good deal as to her political 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. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. 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 . and They rallied around each other when times were hard. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. 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. This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. To the victors we saycongratulations. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. Everything has its season. In the 2011 biographical drama film "The Iron Lady," Meryl Streep plays the role of Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But, as the prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard says: "For things to remain the same, everything must change.". In her thoughtful and prescient remarks, the Prime Minister reached back into history to recall how far the English-Speaking Peoples had come since victory in . Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. In January 1976 she gave the Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. 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. Asked to report on the "state of things" in our country, we could barely see past her. A couple of days later on the 11th, Margaret Thatcher the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote an eulogy for Ronald Reagan. Elton has previously said that he did two minutes about Thatcher and two hours about his knob, and all anyone ever remembered was the Thatcher material. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". 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. But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. 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. Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. "What's going on there, mate?" Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. Real Analysis Solved Problems, Synthesis Essay Freedom Of Speech, Photography Dissertation Titles, Reflective Essay Writers Service Usa, Sample Of The Resume 4423 . The relative wealth of the UK 1% had been falling steadily for 50 years when Thatcher took power in 1979; since then it has climbed steeply and is almost back to 1918 levels. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. We were wary of this. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . She would not have been half the . The financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. 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. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. The left misleads us and maybe itself when it says that Thatcher's policies, extended by New Labour and then by the coalition, have failed. 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. the British Embassy in Paris and stated He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. All Rights Reserved. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. The time was 1973. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) . The battle with the miners and leftwing councils lay ahead, as did the trauma of an IRA assassination bid. Throw the Lib Dems into the mix and it becomes highly combustible. It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. It came very hard, getting the words and paragraphs in the right order, a task for which, she eventually admitted, she had hired some help. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. 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. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. 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. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. Thanks to the comparison with Cameron, we are reminded that the Thatcher reign was more circumspect and well-managed than it seemed at the time. 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. Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. Action. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". wrong with politics? When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. Many of today's more controversial benefits, such as disability, date back to the 80s. 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. a History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. While some remember her as a national saviour, others only see her ruthless demolition of flailing state-owned industries. She worked to enhance its corporate power. Keith Joseph was her guru. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. 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. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. She was right, he was wrong. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. The centralised statism that dominated politics for much of the 20th century, given its last pathetic gasp under the profligate government of Gordon Brown, ultimately failed the poor while proving financially unsustainable and unsuited to modern times. Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective. 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. 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. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. In truth, Thatcher is one of the clearest examples of the fact that a successful woman doesn't always mean a step forward for women. But Thatcher was still cautious. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. The main names associated with Fatcha-bashing Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle deny that they relied so heavily on her for material. Accounts vary. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. 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. It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. But she exploited her luck. 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. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. Whathappened at the hands of this woman's indifference to sentiment andgood sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who losttheir jobs. . And then, perversely, would come the throwaway, sign-off remark to the effect of: "At least you know where you stand with Maggie she hates us and we hate her.". "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. They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech first television interview the following day, euphoric 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 Essay: Health Category. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. 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. Get over her! Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. Edited and full versions of Margaret Thatcher's 'The lady's not for turning' speech, delivered at the Conservative party conference in Brighton on 10 October 1980 Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's 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". In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? 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. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies. The remainder are listed without a text because . The Iron Lady had a green thumband a surprisingly green philosophy. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Farewelling Baroness Margaret Thatcher in a proper fashion is a difficult task: she left such a deep imprint upon the world that assessing its importance demands volumes analyzing her beliefs and paying proper tribute. She was immensely brisk. The last remnants of the postwar consensus were swept away in the ensuing decade a period that saw the crushing of the trade unions, the Big Bang in the City, council house sales, the privatisation of large chunks of industry, the encouragement of inward investment, tax cuts, attempts to roll back the state, a deep manufacturing recession, a boom in North Sea oil production, and support for the creation of a single market in Europe. Thatcher's unwavering belief in the invisible hand of the market meant that she did not believe it was part of her job description to put anything in its place. But the left also needs to look beyond the turbulent events in Europe to appreciate the speed of global change and the complications this creates for welfare-laden economies: the dynamos and innovators are increasingly found in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than France, Germany and Spain. For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997. 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. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez: "To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.". Margaret Thatcher has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings. To her detractors, Thatcher is the prime minister who wiped out more than 15% of Britain's industrial base with her dogmatic monetarism, squandered the once-in-a-lifetime windfall of North Sea oil on unemployment pay and tax cuts, and made the UK the unbalanced, unequal country it is today. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. It isn't sad for anyone else. She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity. And the miners. 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. Scotland was her mission impossible. Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. as far as can be known. can do business together". "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just another one bites the dust " This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association. My dad, I suspect, did. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? But unlike Thatcher, president Hugo Chvez of Venezuela, the "president of the poor", fought for a caring economy and against the rule of the market. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. All rights reserved. Reagan was received coolly, and the discussion was highly superficial, if only because the British side clearly did not care to engage on substance: meet for a serious discussion with a movie actor and a "Grade B" actor at that? That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher's Britain. of times. Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. 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. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. at The Hague in May 1992. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. The government's welfare bill has been swollen by tax credits and housing benefit caused by the labour market reforms and council house sales of the 1980s. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. For the most part, it has not been undone. ", 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. One turns with gratitude to Alan Clark's diaries for a fine description of being summoned to No 10 and being subjected to just such an examination. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. 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 . There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? Out! During the speech, . 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 as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. 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. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. Before the real Thatcher's election in 1979 she took lessons with a speech coach at the Royal National Theatre, hoping to make her voice more commanding and less "shrill" in broadcasts. The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. We can't blame (or credit) her for all of this, of course. Few would argue that they have not endured. 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." I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. 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. 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. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. All rights reserved. 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. Maggie! They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. Gloves. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. Had pollsters and the 24/7 media forced leaders to follow opinion, not lead it? A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. 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 . There were sporadic resurrections. with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician 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. The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. 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. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. She invited the She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. Without the Falklands/Malvinas war, which exploited nationalism (as Argentinian dictator Galtieri did) and which Labour would not oppose, she would never have been re-elected in 1983. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse.
Calculate Reading Glasses From Prescription,
Articles M