Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. 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. Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture . Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. 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. "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. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. Miners had always known that eventually any of the colleries would close and were always prepared to accept that as a fact of life and find employment somewhere else within the industry, but Thatcher's attack was wholesale. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. 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 Look inside your own house, at the water coming out of the tap: once a public utility but, after Thatcher, the property of private companies, many foreign-owned. Only today are we facing the cost. She defended Ronald There are more than 8,000. 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. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. Of course, it's in politics that the shadow looms most clearly. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually. Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche. It was not interested in a resolution. Alamat kami. If they have no bread, let them eat from food banks that's Thatcherism, the legacy we are still to bury before it buries us. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. She was a gentle and peaceable woman my mother, that is and said few hard words about anyone, but in certain parts of the United Kingdom, and among certain social classes, Mrs T was detested, and not just for what people thought were her policies but for her persona for what she was. one Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough She may have got it slightly wrong. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. 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. 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. On the same edition of Channel 4 News, Louise Mensch named only three successful female politicians as part of her defence ofThatcher and only one of those was a Conservative. The spell of community. Steely, certainly. The speakers form a rollcall of the globe's most interesting thinkers: Amartya Sen, the Nobel-winning Indian economist; Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologist and another Nobel winner; and Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, who focused on land rights for the poor. And for the people of Ireland, and especially the north, the Thatcher years were among some of the worst of the conflict. Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. Behind "omnishambles" headlines, her revolution is being pushed forward on new fronts in schools, health, planning, policing, probation and welfare. Less noted . ", 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. 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. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. 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. The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). And in 1983, for the first time, children born in Britain to non-British parents were denied automatic citizenship, fostering further racism and discrimination in immigration policy. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. 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". 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. 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. We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. 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. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. She worked to enhance its corporate power. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. By 1987, anti-Tory tactical voting had taken hold. Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? It still does. 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. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". She made one I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. She, for one, never underestimated her friend from California, then a state of some 24 million. A meeting in Downing Street had left the Pakistan leader besotted with the older woman's wisdom and generosity: '"I tell you, she's such a kind person.". Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. She invited the "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. wrong with politics? Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. 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. The last time I met her was after all this was over. Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. Any such objections would have been invalid. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. Margaret Thatcher. April 8, 2013. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. 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.". Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. 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. The cautious tactician was suppressed. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. 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. We Americans will not see you again in our time, but we will never forget you. 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. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. For the most part, it has not been undone. It knew what Thatcher wanted. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. with the European Community when she The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. In short, miners believed in society. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, 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. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. 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. I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. 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. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.". That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. 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. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave Absurd or not, it does indeed seem alien not least to those born in the 1980s, the generation we shall always call Thatcher's children. Nobody, at least that I know of, objected to that observation on the ground that it was disrespectful to the ability of the Chavez family to mourn in peace. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. Leaving aside the detail that the word "feminist" came into existence in 1895, comfortably in Chanel's lifetime, the woman who valued femininity above all other qualities in a woman and was heavily involved with the Nazis, including a wartime relationship with German officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, could not, in any circumstances, be described as a feminist. . Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. Promises. decision to resign. Although the "right to buy" and the privatisation of utilities by selling shares to new small investors was often justified as giving rights to "the little people", the reality is that the less well-off fell ever further behind the rich. Margaret Thatcher was not known for her sense of humour. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? The Tories triumphed, of course, and lost only two sitting MPs Hamish Gray and the social-security scrounger-bashing Iain Sproat, who vacated his marginal Aberdeen seat and headed for the Scottish Borders, only to suffer defeat there at the hands of the Alliance. outlook at the time. A week later she spoke She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). 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. Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. . By 1990 it was transformed. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. . 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." This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. In a eulogy by the former prime minister of Great Britain, Margret Thatcher honors the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the late president. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. This was a historic step, and resulted in further reinforcing the US-UK alliance. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. She forced us to decide what was truly important. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. One leading Tory thinker said current academic concepts such as evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics were fundamentally rightwing; another said disruptive digital technology liberated individuals against powerful behemoths which may be true, but some of the most striking online advances harness the collective spirit. The set text is still Thatcher's declaration quoted in The Audience that "There is no such thing as society". Her Irish policy failed miserably. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. That's because, 23 years after she was ejected from Downing Street by her own party in a move whose psychic wounds linger on, the country we live in remains Thatcher's Britain. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. 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. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. 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. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. 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. Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. Indeed a person with achemistry that repelled almost all thesignificant males in Edward Heath's cabinet who could never become theparty leader. But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: Take the larger view. After all, the right began to refocus only after Tony Blair's second landslide, when people began to recognise they would not drift back into power.

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