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The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives 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. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. The battle with the miners and leftwing councils lay ahead, as did the trauma of an IRA assassination bid. When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. These talks, sometimes joined by the prime minister and run by his aide Rohan Silva, show the restless search for new ideas that still grips the right, one of the least recognised legacies of Margaret Thatcher. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. Thatcher is remembered for her achievements, but more for a presence, which was wrapped up with being a woman. At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. 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 invited the What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. There are many reasons for this. A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. To the victors we saycongratulations. The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. Accounts vary. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. 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.". Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. 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 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. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive. 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. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . The last time I met her was after all this was over. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." There were sporadic resurrections. Out! speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. 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. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) Margaret Thatcher has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings. 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 poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. 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. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. Lady Thatcher, you honor us by coming to the site of Sir Winston's pivotal speech, an event Westminster College has immortalized with the beautiful Winston Churchill Memorial. In her eulogy for the former president, Thatcher uses specific structure, tone and diction, and word choices throughout her writing to . But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. 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. The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. Hats. Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. 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 . But on their catastrophic economic policy, it's full-speed ahead into the concrete wall. 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. 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. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom's first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. . She was among the first Western leaders to In 1980, I made several fast round trips to London, Paris and Bonn, and, on each occasion, had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Thatcher. But really, such statements were anything but, first because sweeping statements about genders are the opposite of gender equality and second because they revealed her real attitude towards women, which lay behind her notable lack of female-friendly policies, her utter lack of interest in childcare provision or positive action. The evidence shows that greater equality provides the foundation on which higher standards of social wellbeing can be built. The last remnants of the postwar consensus were swept away in the ensuing decade a period that saw the crushing of the trade unions, the Big Bang in the City, council house sales, the privatisation of large chunks of industry, the encouragement of inward investment, tax cuts, attempts to roll back the state, a deep manufacturing recession, a boom in North Sea oil production, and support for the creation of a single market in Europe. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a What is really left by Thatcher to history? or copyright prevents reproduction on the site. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". Words. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. In January 1976 she gave the 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. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. . 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' Just look around. Each now seems banal. 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. Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. Secondly, the balance of power in industrial relations was shifted decisively in favour of employers. 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. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. be a nation in retreat". 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. What's more, it was moulded to the wall as one commentator recalled and you had no right to change it, not without becoming entangled in a state-managed bureaucracy. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke 1971 was the year of Ted Heath's Conservative government, which was trying to make huge savings to the budget. Alamat kami. 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. 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. In rich societies such as the UK, what makes most difference to the real quality of our lives is the quality of community life and social interaction. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? A growing body of research now shows that the quality of social relations is among the most powerful influences on the happiness, health and wellbeing of populations in the rich countries. 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. They're not Thatcher. talked of "Victorian Values". At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. 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. On one visit, our campaign chairman, William J Casey, later director of the CIA, came along, and we had a fruitful meeting at 10 Downing Street. She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. All rights reserved. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. They married the personality and belief to action. As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association. It still does. 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 . How dare her apologists and beneficiaries of her legacy refer to trade unions like the NUM as "corrupt" in the face of their bonuses and tax cuts! When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. This is what we mean by the Thatcher revolution, imposing on Britain, for better or for worse, some of the liberalisation that the major continental economies know,20 years later, they still need. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. 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. Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. Nor, contrary to myth, did Thatcherism emerge fully formed in May 1979. The word "free" is used to help the audience 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. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. 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. One might even credit Thatcher with a willingness to jettison the old rules and conventions that used to prevent individuals deciding their own destiny. MT gave her first She was right, he was wrong. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell."