She became deaf to all warning. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' When the mourners gather for Baroness Thatcher's funeral tomorrow, one important figure from her political past will be . LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. Well, everything really, even her name. On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. with the European Community when she Thatcher came to power when the economy was approaching a moment of truth after three decades of poor performance relative to other western countries. To project the ideas of strength and . Rather, she was a classic example of a certain kind of conservative woman who believed that all women should pull themselves up just as she had done, conveniently overlooking that not all women are blessed with the privileges that had been available to her, such as a wealthy and supportive husband and domestic help. She gave it her best shot. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. She adopts an endearing and sentimental tone using ethos, repetition, and . But she became a very effective one. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. However, for almost a decade Sinn Fin had been patently trying to build a peace process and unfolding events on the world stage including the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and the release of Mandela were evidence that governments, and apparently intractable situations, could change. 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 last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. But Thatcher was still cautious. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. To Britons of my generation, she . Hats. This was most evident in the shooting dead of three unarmed IRA activists in Gibraltar in March 1988. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. 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. Whathappened at the hands of this woman's indifference to sentiment andgood sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who losttheir jobs. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Just look around. 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. 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. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. She was "outraged" when the programmes went ahead. 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 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. Margaret Thatcher. Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. in his defence during the IranContra affair, told Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. Asked to report on the "state of things" in our country, we could barely see past her. She was among the first Western leaders to Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide itcannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history. Margaret Thatcher might seem to some like an unlikely pioneer of the need for climate action but, in the late 1980s, she made a series of remarkable speeches and interventions on the subject and . She defended Ronald It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". She went to a fee-paying school and to Oxford at her father's expense, gliding easily into the upper echelons of student politics. Sue Gray used to be my boss. be a nation in retreat". She made her maiden 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. Superlatives can be agreed: a remarkable first woman PM; the first winner of three elections in a row; brave; tough; relentless; clever; sleeplessly driven by a self-confident conviction that overawed her enemies. It was not interested in a resolution. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word. The Bruges speech was given by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the College of Europe at the Belfry of Bruges, Belgium, on 20 September 1988.Thatcher was opposed to any moves to transition the European Economic Community (EEC) into a federal Europe that would take powers away from its members. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during Reagan's presidency, and was close with him which Following in the footsteps of Santa Claus, Steve Hynd quickly compiled a list of all the naughty boys and girls "on the left" who dared to express criticisms of the dearly departed Prime Minister, warning that he "will continue to add to this list throughout the day". Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). Mrs T shared the same reductionism. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. During Margaret Thatcher's rise to the top, he was one of the backroom figures whose words helped create her reputation as the Iron Lady. 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 But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. Maybe it was the sound of the estuary pronunciation robbing her of her aspirational airs, a prototype of the Bouquet/Bucket joke. 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. All rights reserved. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. The tragic upshot has been the steep erosion of wages for the powerless bottom half, as income, wealth and property is sucked up to the top. This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. Yet, as the heated benefits debate showed last week, Labour is trapped by history bereft of fresh ideas and, when tentatively offering proposals, strangled by the most stifling conservatism. In a eulogy by the former prime minister of Great Britain, Margret Thatcher honors the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the late president. This was hardly the first or even the worst example of a dig at Thatcher tinged so needlessly with sexism. This report of the Conservative party conference ran in the Guardian on Saturday October 11 1980, 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, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. In 1982, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a church for 12 days in protest against "police illegality and racism in King's Cross" the area to which many sex workers known as "Thatcher's girls" had travelled from high unemployment areas in the Midlands and the north. No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. In January 1983 she Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. She was immensely brisk. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. The items stored in this section of the site are texts, but many of the most important statements are also available in audio or video form in the separate Multimedia section. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. 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. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. 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. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. Farewelling Baroness Margaret Thatcher in a proper fashion is a difficult task: she left such a deep imprint upon the world that assessing its importance demands volumes analyzing her beliefs and paying proper tribute. Any such objections would have been invalid. Now it was the turn of the words, and no one, of course, would, against all the odds, do them better than the lady who, 25 years before, once thought the sky was beyond her limit. Thatcher came to personify those ready to push anyone aside to gain power in a man's world and strengthen that world with their ambition. or copyright prevents reproduction on the site. Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. speech in the House of Commons, her In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. Buy the CD-ROM from this link or find one She considered European Commission president Jacques Delors a campaigner for . We must reduce the inequality that has seen a super-rich elite, openly contemptuous of the flag and family values Thatcher proclaimed, float free from the rest of us. The news last week that they are instead considering cutting or freezing the minimum wage surely undermines any pretence that the government is acting either coherently or in the public interest. The poll-tax rioters. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. Thatcher's title is Baroness. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. recommended by Simon Heffer. 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. Its strategies included the shallow and ineffectual 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement which was about creating a political alliance involving the Dublin establishment, the SDLP and the British to defeat Irish republicanism. Out!" On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. Full employment had been ditched in 1976, while Labour had introduced monetary targets and cash limits for Whitehall departments while Denis Healey was at the Treasury. 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. But awoman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. Until her final poll-tax hubris, she knew when swerving was the better part of valour and despite that famous one-liner, she was sometimes for turning. Reagan would often hasten to remind those paying tribute to his cold war strategy that it was, in the strictest sense of the term, a team effort. 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). When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship.
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