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. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. 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. She made her remarks Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. But she also provided great material. A strong, so strong, leader. Peggy Noonan. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. It's true that whenever there's a major news story, millions of people immediately begin strip-mining it for puns and bon mots, making it harder for professional comics to develop focused, funny material that nobody's heard before. In a world where most media talking heads come from the top few percent of income earners, unions are not only important in wage bargaining, they also provide some of the few well-informed voices whose job it is to speak on behalf of the less well-paid. 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 . Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. 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." She gave it her best shot. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. As far as her supporters are concerned, this radical transformation worked. No gloves, or hats, except for royalty or at funerals, but feet on the table, whisky glass at hand, into the small hours of solitude, for want of male cronies in the masculine world she dominated for all her 11yearsin power. first television interview the following day, euphoric The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. The machinery of modern political management polls, consulting, focus groups is deployed mainly to discover what will make aparty and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. she warned that she was not April 8, 2013. It was a Charles I moment in British history. Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. The resignation was announced I don't see that. The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. 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. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. Thatcher's title is Baroness. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and she Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. In January 1983 she Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. On 30 October 1990 she made the first of the That did the trick.). 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 . By 1990 it was transformed. A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. If you have a . When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. She made one By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. This has been a terrible labour, she said. While some remember her as a national saviour, others only see her ruthless demolition of flailing state-owned industries. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. Miners were a hardy race of people who faced constant danger in the cause of mining coal but underneath that they were caring, sensitive individuals with a commitment to the communities in which they lived. "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. We were not unique in such a response but she failed to appreciate that Scots are balanced, canny folk insofar as we have a well-developed chip on each shoulder. This speech was delivered soon after her taking office in 1979. 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 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. "Maggie! speech in the House of Commons, her Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. 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. 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. 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. 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. 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. The task of representing the White House usually was the role of the vice-president, but in this special case, the Reagans and the Bushes both attended. The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. "No, no, no". The evidence shows that greater equality provides the foundation on which higher standards of social wellbeing can be built. a new dominance from Brussels", the We liked disliking her. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher's Britain. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. for turning. We must reduce the inequality that has seen a super-rich elite, openly contemptuous of the flag and family values Thatcher proclaimed, float free from the rest of us. . We Americans will not see you again in our time, but we will never forget you. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We 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. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . The tragic upshot has been the steep erosion of wages for the powerless bottom half, as income, wealth and property is sucked up to the top. . History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. Demonising unions and stripping the great mass of private-sector workers of a voice and power in the workplace is still the root of the great living standards crisis that saw the share of wealth going to wages slide long before Lehman Brothers failed. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. "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. announced that White The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. Promises. Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. ", 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. Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. 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. 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. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. Would we like her back? She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. Being a woman is undoubtedly one of the features, possibly the most potent, that makes her ascent to power memorable, 25 years on, in a way that applied to no man. 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. Two especially forceful and committed leaders on the world stage at the same time: this was critical and key to ending the cold war, permitting the reunification of Germany, the consolidation of the EU and drawing our two nations together in a historic cooperation. Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. Rishi Sunak 20 July 2022 9:30pm. She became harder than hard. 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. Maggie! 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. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. Get over her! Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! 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. "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. When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. The novel may thrive in adversity and it was a general sense of dismay at the new world she was showing us that lured many writers into opposition. 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. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. So it suggests the anachronistic and unaffordable return to a contributory welfare system, while opposing the further opening up of education and health provision; some even float the renationalisation of railways. On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. 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!" As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them. Was it cruelty? She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. The 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. The last time I met her was after all this was over. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. But awoman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete Her Irish policy failed miserably. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. She was "outraged" when the programmes went ahead. No sign they learned from her that markets don't move in to fill the gaps when the state is rolled back not then, not now. A massive programme of social housing would be a good place to start, stimulating the economy. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. 1971 was the year of Ted Heath's Conservative government, which was trying to make huge savings to the budget. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) The dockers. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. Keith Joseph was her guru. She was 87. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. To Britons of my generation, she . with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician 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? Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. Without it, she would have been nothing. But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive. 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. Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. As I see it, and as one who had the pleasure of knowing both, they would recognize the huge opportunity created by the presence of each in the respective national and international policy-making role. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. 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. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. Asked to report on the "state of things" in our country, we could barely see past her. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. April 25, 2020. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. declared that she wanted our money back. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. She all but erased his political legacy to stamp her own image on the nation, so Britain before and after Thatcher were two different countries. Several strong women on the continent have risen to the top, but thisBritish woman, in Britain of all places, became a phenomenon, first, throughher gender. April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. Maggie! 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. She wanted to win, but did not put much faith in the quick smile. 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. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". I was just behind her at the civic museum in Dubrovnik when the local guide explained a model showing the elaborate system of ancient wells and tunnels that had provided the city with fresh water no matter how fierce the siege. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. Look at the cars on the road, none made by the old, nationally-owned British Leyland and only few by the British marques that once dominated but which went the way of much of British industry unable to survive the chill wind of "market forces", another phrase which filled the air back then. She describes Reagan as her friend and continues to narrate his good acts in America during his presidency. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. Accounts vary. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. 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. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. 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. Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. Out! of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly about the environment and climate change. 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. Council house sales and advertising campaigns that encouraged the public to buy shares in privatised companies were meant to broaden the appeal of capitalism. This is an especially pertinent problem given its heartfelt desire for redistribution of wealth. 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. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. 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. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. Oxford CD-ROM explains how the statements were assembled and edited performance at a Press Conference afterwards. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. The Bruges speech was given by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the College of Europe at the Belfry of Bruges, Belgium, on 20 September 1988.Thatcher was opposed to any moves to transition the European Economic Community (EEC) into a federal Europe that would take powers away from its members.
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