In 1976 it still did not help and in the same year they had to take a loan in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [] . Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. Reagan, for one, recognized the importance of Margaret Thatcher's presence as British prime minister, but would caution any discussionpartnerthat Pope John Paul played an equally important role. She was right, he was wrong. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). 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 . This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. But now the history was what mattered. Even the nasty politics of "welfare reform" is driven by the high cost of subsidising low pay through in-work benefits, and indifference to the plight of jobless communities who have never recovered from de-industrialisation. Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. 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. first television interview the following day. 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. 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. She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. 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. . It was not interested in a resolution. Such items have an The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. Following several small strokes she announced, in March 2002, that her career as a speechmaker had ended. Emery Evans . Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. So instead: "I put it to her that we would be saving money." still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, 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. 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. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. The set text is still Thatcher's declaration quoted in The Audience that "There is no such thing as society". November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. Britain's relative decline came to an end, although that was more due to slowdowns in countries such as France and Germany than an acceleration in UK productivity growth. Nor, contrary to myth, did Thatcherism emerge fully formed in May 1979. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. 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. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. The result . Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. She was able to reach Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. 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. Reagan was especially interested in Mrs Thatcher's domestic policy initiatives, and it was quickly established that the foreign policy views ran along parallel lines. Thatcher's reign helped to inspire alternative comedy by creating a generation so bereft of hope that they started putting on gigs just for the sake of something to do. On 30 October 1990 she made the first of the 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. Get over her! The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office. 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. We still live in the land Margaret built. "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. 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. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. From the invention of the term "sado-monetarism" through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation's masochistic imagination. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. It was meant as a term of condemnation, a concise way of arguing that riots in the street or the devastation of a pit village were the inevitable features of this new land that had arisen in the 1980s, a country reshaped by the woman at the top. Sent Bobby Sands to an Irish hero's grave without a blink. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? In January 1983 she 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". Nelson travelled to South Africa where he helped negotiate a deal that saw the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance acquire AK-47 automatic rifles, pistols, grenades, and RPG rocket launchers in late 1987 or early 1988. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. a Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. My dad, I suspect, did. That's history, but what matters to us is her legacy now that her heirs and imitators rule in her wake. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Behind "omnishambles" headlines, her revolution is being pushed forward on new fronts in schools, health, planning, policing, probation and welfare. Was it cruelty? Opponents and supporters of Margaret Thatcher will never agree about the value of her legacy, but as for her importance, her hypnotic hold on us, they are bound to find common ground. All Rights Reserved. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. Thatcher jokes were big business, from Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, to Harry Enfield's satire of Thatcher's children with his Loadsamoney character. She became deaf to all warning. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she This was her last important public statement. It was seen for what it was, nothing to do with economics, but purely an attempt to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers by wiping out the entire industry. But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive. This is a style whose absence is much missed. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. Margaret Thatcher had planned to attack Labour's unwillingness to condemn picket-line violence in her 1984 conference speech but changed her mind when an IRA bomb hit The Grand Hotel in Brighton. 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. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. Margaret Thatcher's 1980 speech was written by playwright Ronnie Miller, and Julia recalls that the night before delivering the speech she had a huge row with him about the content. To project the ideas of strength and . I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here. What will not be forgotten? It knew what Thatcher wanted. Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. In this eulogy, Thatcher uses rhetorical strategies to convince her readers into believing what she states. Handbag. It was all very well for me to write books. 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. 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. From 1987 to 1988, he was a senior policy writer and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.. O'Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio . It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. The poll-tax rioters. Margaret Thatcher. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. So the woman I met in Curzon Street, dimpling elegantly, can now be seen in history with an unexpected achievement to her credit. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . In 11 years, Thatcher promoted only one woman to her cabinet, preferring instead to elevate men whom Spitting Image memorably and, in certain instances, accurately, described as "vegetables". I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. This, too, we still live with. But Labour is no less in thrall. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. 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. MT gave her first She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom's first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. . On Saturday, 27 February, he wrote in his diary: "PM getting great press went up to the [Capitol] Hill some of the senators tried to give her a bad time, she put them down firmly and with typical British courtesy.". The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. 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. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. Alamat kami. In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest. The 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. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. declared that she wanted our money back. She mesmerised us. 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. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. You can get the Turnitin report from the writer on request along with the final deliverable. 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. 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. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". cent of cases. 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. The woman, however, changed. In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and Today's Tories walk in Thatcher's footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy. The resignation was announced How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? By the close of her premiership, he was probably the most trusted member of her political team at Downing Street, and he left Number Ten with her. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. All rights reserved. Maggie! 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. Indeed, many of the policy innovations associated with Thatcher had already been pioneered by her predecessor. Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. A strong pound crippled exports and emptied factories. Chvez is gone, but the voters are likely to re-elect Chavismo on 14 April. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. In the current wall-to-wall media welter, I caught the current leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davison MSP, being asked if Thatcher was an electoral asset for her. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. By raising the pay of their own staff to a minimum of the living wage, they have set an example which a growing number of large private-sector employers have followed. "Being powerful is like being a lady. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. verbatim and in context. She was propped up by police who were encouraged to brutality against not only strikers but communities of colour, already hardest hit by unemployment: police powers were enhanced and their racism given free rein, especially with stop and search; CS gas was used on the mainland for the first time. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. 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. Sue Gray used to be my boss. 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. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. for the disk. Maybe my memory is fanciful. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher's Britain. But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. 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. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. Thatcher's passing is marked by street parties in Brixton, Belfast, Bristol, Derry, Glasgow and Liverpool, and seething bitterness among the mining families and communities she was allowed (including by scab union and Labour leaders) to destroy. "Labour is stuck because they do not want to carry on the slimming down of the state and devolution of power but nor do they really want to reverse it," said one central Tory figure. This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . By 1987, anti-Tory tactical voting had taken hold. Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. speech in the House of Commons, her By John Cassidy. 1971 was the year of Ted Heath's Conservative government, which was trying to make huge savings to the budget. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. 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 . 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 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 . Many hated her. 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. For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Not all writers were against her. 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. with the European Community when she After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning? Meryl Streep's depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. . 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. 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. Margaret Thatcher (October 13, 1925 - April 8, 2013) was the first woman prime minister of the United Kingdom and the first European woman to serve as a prime minister. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. The Lady forced the opposition party to accommodate itself to the new, Thatcherite settlement in which the market would rule unless stated otherwise. There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. 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. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. 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. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". talked of "Victorian Values". We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. It came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. 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. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. 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. In January 1976 she gave the 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.".