Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. She forced us to decide what was truly important. "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. 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 . 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. There is a paradox. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. At times the Conservative party is so anarchic as to appear almost ungovernable, like a plethora of pressure groups pushing pet causes rather than a united group ruthlessly focusing on political success. 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. As working families in poverty now account for more than half of those below the poverty line, a government committed to "making work pay" should surely encourage this trend and raise the minimum wage. As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? 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. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. 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. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. We liked disliking her. In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. Thatcher came to power when the economy was approaching a moment of truth after three decades of poor performance relative to other western countries. But she became a very effective one. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. 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. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. The latest pit to close, Maltby in Yorkshire, still has a death and general purpose fund to help fellow miners and their families in times of hardship. 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. There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. Arthur Scargill and the miners represented the only opposition to the prime minister and her destructive and divisive values and, after the strike, the way was open for the most aggressive neoliberal policies. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. 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. But Thatcher was a naturally, perhaps incurably, divisive figure. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher emerged as one of the first world leaders to champion climate science, issuing a call to action to fight manmade global warming at the Second World Climate Conference hosted at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. 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. 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 word "free" is used to help the audience November). Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. 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. This speech was delivered soon after her taking office in 1979. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! 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. 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." The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. Heath took us into Europe, and a referendum in spring 1975 confirmed national approval for the move. But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. She was among the first Western leaders to 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. This, too, we still live with. Thatcher's unwavering belief in the invisible hand of the market meant that she did not believe it was part of her job description to put anything in its place. Instead state assets and a huge income stream from North sea oil were used to fund a populist programme of tax cuts, privatisation and council housesales. 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. Tasteless." which revealed a good deal as to her political 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. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? That did the trick.). There are more than 8,000. 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. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. From her start in politics, Thatcher often attracted sexist critiques for the way she spoke, with many it dubbing her voice "shrill" and "patronizing." Television critic Clive James even compared . I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. first television interview the following day, euphoric Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke While she spoke of his example as a beacon, she knew very well that she was an important component of what is often attributed solely to him, and in the first instance "winning" the cold war. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . of times. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. I was on my own. In short, miners believed in society. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. A friend of South African apartheid and mass murderers from Kissinger and Pinochet to the Khmer Rouge after they had killed two million Cambodians she was a zealous saleswoman for the arms industry. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. While Labour was now "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", ambitious feminism wanted to be let in to the boardroom and every corridor of power that and little else is what they mean by changing the world. Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. 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. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising And we won back three we lost at by-elections. "Being powerful is like being a lady. She certainly was divisive, bisecting the country politically and geographically: hard-hit regions in the north of England, Wales and Scotland may be notably less civil in their farewells. Endeavouring to persuade the British into an attitude of hostility to the group with which she spent 11 years deepening their connection must take a high place in any catalogue of anti-statesmanship. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. But this didn't come without a price. A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. At every level of his killing, British agents and agencies had a hand: the leader of the UDA group that carried out the killing was a Special Branch agent, as was the man who confessed to being the gunman, and the man who supplied the gun. 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. September 25, 2020. 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. 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. It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him a third of the country, according to some polls a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. Her Irish policy failed miserably. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. 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. But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing ahat. and The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. 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. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? performance at a Press Conference afterwards. The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. She usually knew the limits to public tolerance, gauging how much of the spirit of '45 abided, so even if it was between gritted teeth, she forced herself to say, "The NHS is safe in our hands": she reorganised but did not privatise it. 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. We are all on our own. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a Getting the record straight. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. It was a Charles I moment in British history. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. 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. Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective. 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.". Thank you, too, Margaret. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. 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 Britain's record on innovation and investment have been extremely poor, while the hollowing out of manufacturing left the economy over-dependent on the de-regulated City. 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 . 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. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). 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. On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly about the environment and climate change. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. That bonuses and top incomes continue to rise while the incomes of the rest of the population struggle to keep up with inflation tells us that what we needed was legislation to ensure employee representation on company boards and remuneration committees as many of our European partners have. 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. April 8, 2013. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. But she exploited her luck. 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. So instead: "I put it to her that we would be saving money." 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. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. The battle with the miners and leftwing councils lay ahead, as did the trauma of an IRA assassination bid. 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. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. 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." The dominance of finance in the economy and the failure of bank regulation flowed from her belief that markets should always be left to themselves. 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. It is full of insights into a neglected aspect of how Thatcher came to dominate British politics." (Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield, UK) "A fascinating insight into the world of speech writing. Her imitators swerve all over the place, with 37 U-turns at the Telegraph's latest count on matters from forests and pasties to buzzard nests and caravans. 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. 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 . No homeless or disabled people need beg on the streets. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. 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. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. 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 speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one at The Hague in May 1992. After leaving office, MT widened and deepened her criticism of the European The result . The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted.
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