For those miners and their families to be referred to as the "enemy within" by Thatcher was something they would never forgive and, if there is rejoicing at her death in those communities she set out to destroy, it can only be understood against this background. When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries. And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. The fact is that if both sides removed their ideological blinkers, as Thatcher, remarkably perhaps, managed to do, then her trilogy of speeches in the late 1980s still offer some of the best and . 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. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. 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. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) My dad, I suspect, did. It chose her ina fit of desperation, hats and all though it quite liked the hats. She may have got it slightly wrong. Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. More insidiously, it fathered amood of tolerated harshness. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. speech in the House of Commons, her 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. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. Thatcher's Spitting Image puppet was different from the others; while other characters, such as Ronald Reagan and the pope, were exaggerated into fantasy versions of themselves, the rubber Maggie was just like the one who appeared on the news a stern, cold, matronly figure who had a slightly oedipal relationship with her cabinet. Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. 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. Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. There is now, however, an opportunity to commit to a new politics that learns lessons from her ambition yet undoes the damage and focuses on reconstruction. By John Cassidy. September 25, 2020. 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. She mesmerised us. One thinks now of the closing words of her splendid 2004 eulogy of Ronald Reagan, and how those words so perfectly speak a tribute to her life and works: "We here still move in twilight. The price we all continue to pay for Thatcherite policies is to live in a less cohesive and more antisocial society, in which community life is weaker, people feel less able to trust each other and fewer of those in government have the experience and compassion to represent or understand the vast majority. 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. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. Certainly, in 1983, it did not occur to me to criticise Harold Macmillan or Alec Douglas-Home on the doorstep as a sure-fire vote turner. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. The Man Whose Powerful Critique of Socialism Influenced Margaret Thatcher 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. The last time I met her was after all this was over. We had had a strange relationship. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. Maggie! "What's going on there, mate?" 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. ", 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. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. Thatcher came to power when the economy was approaching a moment of truth after three decades of poor performance relative to other western countries. Such items have an In the pantheon of this comedian's attacks on Thatcher, it was a retort that probably won't be treasured longer than the best lines from The Young Ones. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. departing Downing Street on 28 November. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. More than once the view was advanced that it was a pity the IRA had not succeeded in their ultimate objective when they bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton. and But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing ahat. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. As I spread my wings in politics, I discovered many Thatcher voters down south who were the same kind of people who loathed her in Scotland. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. 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. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). Without it, she would have been nothing. 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. Margaret Flowers is a leading activist, doctor, teacher, and co-founder of PopularResistance.org, a website that aims to inform and inspire grassroots movements around the world. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. 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. A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. 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. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". 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. 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. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. Emery Evans . There are more than 8,000. Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. 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. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. It made minor savings at best and was, as the . Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. Scotland was her mission impossible. 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. Margaret Thatcher: Private tears of Iron Lady's speech writer who no 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. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. She remained in power till I was 15. There is a paradox. I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and We are all on our own. Union in a speech Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. Heath took us into Europe, and a referendum in spring 1975 confirmed national approval for the move. The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die. Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you. At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity. A Study of the Emotional Eulogy of Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan She gave it her best shot. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. In the prime Thatcher years they required a severity of will to carry through that would now, if called on, bewrapped in so many cycles of deluding spin as to persuade us it hadn't really happened. Action. Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae | Best Writing Service She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. Perhaps this is unsurprising: four years ago Ed Miliband sneered at "nudge" economics as something "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". The author uses this idea of freedom in her writing to allow the audience to feel and understand the mission of Reagan--"to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism" (6-7). The current crop of leaders are so dull, so ill-defined, so lacking in personality that it's almost impossible for comedians to rage against them. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". Margaret Thatcher Eulogy Rhetorical Analysis - Peachy Essay she The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually. The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. In fact, several countries have adopted these ideas with startlingly successful results; just changing the wording on some forms raised an extra 200m income tax in Britain, while personalised text messages drastically reduced the use of bailiffs to recover court fines. They married the personality and belief to action. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. In 2009, Boris Johnson lamented that Thatcher had become "a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor.". Her Irish policy failed miserably. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? Second was the particular hostility towards Margaret Thatcher and her local ministerial spear-carrier, energy minister and incumbent MP of 13 years' standing, Hamish Gray. Margaret Thatcher - Quotes, Death & Life - Biography The Texan who stole the show at Margaret Thatcher's funeral She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's 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. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. in his defence during the IranContra affair later that year.. Elected for a third term in June 1987, she told During the speech, . ", 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. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. BBC Radio 4 - Green Originals, Margaret Thatcher "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. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. . But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society. This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. 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. That was the daunting task Margaret Thatcher set herself when she arrived in Downing Street in May 1979 at the end of a traumatic decade that had seen a three-day week, inflation topping 25%, a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the winter of discontent. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. As a result, Labour authorities in eight or so British cities have set up fairness commissions to reduce income differences locally. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric This was hardly the first or even the worst example of a dig at Thatcher tinged so needlessly with sexism. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. Words. One also can't forget what happened to the agency that made Thatcher worldfamous: the Conservative party, of which she seemed such an improbable leader. 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. Prime Minister Thatcher inherited a settled state of British Europeanness, in which Brussels and the [European] Community began to influence, and often determine, the British way of doing things. Lady Thatcher's New Threats for Old - National Churchill Museum delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. studying Thatcher's speeches . A week later she spoke 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. 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. She added layers of her own to this intimacy, directing the creation of a single European market that surrendered important national powers to the collective. History, Sample Essay. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . 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. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". Real Analysis Solved Problems, Synthesis Essay Freedom Of Speech, Photography Dissertation Titles, Reflective Essay Writers Service Usa, Sample Of The Resume 4423 . On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. verbatim and in context. 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. The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. 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. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. She forced us to decide what was truly important. 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. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. All Rights Reserved. Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. How Does Ronald Reagan Use Syntax In A Throw To Our Dead 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. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. Tasteless." 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. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. She defended Ronald John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships.