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. Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM, 1945-90, edited Christopher She was always the Spitting Image bully. 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. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. That did the trick.). Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. defended Ronald The Iron Lady had a green thumband a surprisingly green philosophy. a Maggie! deeply felt eulogy, filmed in advance and relayed by video link to screens in the National Cathedral in Washington. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. She was 87. To project the ideas of strength and . How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. Thatcher never kept a diary, but the archive includes rich details of her role in important domestic and world events. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. While some remember her as a national saviour, others only see her ruthless demolition of flailing state-owned industries. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Steely, certainly. The former reporter, who was 90, died with his family around him yesterday lunchtime, a statement said. (Interestingly, Currie also recalled that when she approached Thatcher in 1988 to get approval for the world's first national breast-screening programme, she tried to appeal to the PM initially "as a woman" but that swiftly proved unsuccessful. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. 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.". press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White No single mother raising children was to be called "workless", skipping meals to feed them and forced to ditch them to submit to "workfare" or a starvation wage. It came very hard, getting the words and paragraphs in the right order, a task for which, she eventually admitted, she had hired some help. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. Buy the CD-ROM from this link or find one But, as the prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard says: "For things to remain the same, everything must change.". Out!" Perhaps she had just come inside. Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. It never was. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. My dad, I suspect, did. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". 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 . Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. Far from "smashing the glass ceiling", she was the aberration, the one who got through and then pulled the ladder up right after her. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." Was it cruelty? Faced down trade union leaders after her early years apprentice years, when Jim Callaghan's Britain was falling apart in which the commonest fear was that the little lady would not be able to deal with them across the table. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. ROBIN HARRIS worked for the Conservative Party from 1978, and increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. 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. Well, everything really, even her name. Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful There were sporadic resurrections. 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." Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. camps were revealed in August 1992. Asked to report on the "state of things" in our country, we could barely see past her. Only today are we facing the cost. 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. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. But the sense of community evaporated. 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. Later that year she introduced the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fin, which prevented viewers and listeners hearing my voice. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. But there were also cuts for basic-rate taxpayers: the 1988 budget, for example, cut the top rate of tax from 60% to 40% and the standard rate from 27% to 25%. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. Nations need to know the big picture of where they belong and, coinciding with the Thatcher appearance at the top, clarity had apparently broken through the clouds of historic ambivalence. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. It destroyed the public's power to determine via parliament the services and prices of gas, electricity, telephone. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. MT gave her first British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." I don't see that. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, replied Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. Emery Evans . 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. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. which revealed a good deal as to her political 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. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. 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. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . 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. As a physician, she has been a vocal advocate for a single-payer healthcare system that would . At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. 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. 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. It was all very well for me to write books. 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. We still live in the land Margaret built. In 1984 Britain had 186 working coalmines and approximately 170,000 coalminers. 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. 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 credit boom both here and in the USA may have gone against her Grantham roots but was an equally inevitable result of deregulation and the temptation of easy loans for people hungry to improve living standards. Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: "Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her.". The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric The set text is still Thatcher's declaration quoted in The Audience that "There is no such thing as society". Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. Union in a speech It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. 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 has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings. 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. 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. Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Heath took us into Europe, and a referendum in spring 1975 confirmed national approval for the move. The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". 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. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez: "To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.". Sayle recorded the song Get Me Mrs Thatcher, but says that in general he felt Thatcher jokes were a bit too easy, although he still shudders at the memory of a "wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s". This, too, we still live with. opportunities. 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 True, Labour, James Callaghan and the unions played their part by blocking Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife attempt to create German or Nordic co-operation between unions and industry that might have rescued unions from Thatcher's crushing. 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. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) This was her last important public statement. the British Embassy in Paris and stated I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. 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. It's telling that Tony Blair's domestic legacy amounts to two responses to Thatcherism: forcing Labour to accept it and then compensating for the damage the Tories had wreaked through sustained underinvestment in the public realm. 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. In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference The economic crisis that Britain faced had been created not by the working class itself, these wholesome people that Sir Keith remembered from his vac weeks in Barnsley, but by a working-class leadership that was determined to bring the whole system crashing down. There is a paradox. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. Above all, they lack her competence at running the machinery of government. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. 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. On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident. 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. All rights reserved. It was a Charles I moment in British history. 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. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. Published: Sunday 21st February 2021. We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers. In his usual slightly dishevelled style, he went to Downing Street to discuss his pioneering concepts of behavioural economics and attempts to implement them under Barack Obama. 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. 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. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? A week later she spoke 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. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. The financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. 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. Meanwhile, you struggle to identify deep thinkers in party ranks beyond a couple of veteran stalwarts; even the left's thinktanks appear moribund or merely harking back to an idealised past. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. The most important thing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did for British politics was to understand the significance of Thatcherism and to decide not to reverse it, indeed to carry it forward. So what caused this great divide, with one side a fountain of fresh ideas and the other struggling for new inspiration? And he would credit the contribution of Helmut Kohl, who rose to power in Germany in part because of the influence of Thatcher and Reagan. "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. There had been Churchill and his defiance; there had been Kipling and his If; there had been her father in his grocer's shop in Grantham. 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 On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go.