And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. In 2009, Boris Johnson lamented that Thatcher had become "a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor.". No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. In this eulogy, Thatcher uses rhetorical strategies to convince her readers into believing what she states. I just now watched the British Gas one again. first television interview the following day. 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. 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. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. 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. Everything has its season. 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. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. She lost seven cabinet ministers on the Europe question, a record that permeated the party for years afterwards. Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. What will not be forgotten? Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. 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. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not North sea oil was squandered when it should have seeded new industries. One turns with gratitude to Alan Clark's diaries for a fine description of being summoned to No 10 and being subjected to just such an examination. Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. 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 She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. Getting the record straight. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. So it suggests the anachronistic and unaffordable return to a contributory welfare system, while opposing the further opening up of education and health provision; some even float the renationalisation of railways. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. 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. studying Thatcher's speeches . We were wary of this. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. It's true that whenever there's a major news story, millions of people immediately begin strip-mining it for puns and bon mots, making it harder for professional comics to develop focused, funny material that nobody's heard before. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) But it was the killing of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989 that reveals the depth of the Thatcher government's state collusion policy. Maggie! 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". It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture . Following several small strokes she announced, in March 2002, that her career as a speechmaker had ended. She may have got it slightly wrong. Philip Larkin visited Downing Street where the prime minister quoted approvingly one of his lines to him "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives." Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae. The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. She was immensely brisk. For her own part, she was a social conservative and yet today's right for, say, gay couples to marry if they want to fits with one aspect of the Thatcherite vision of personal choice. There are many reasons for this. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". 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. in his defence during the IranContra affair later that year.. Elected for a third term in June 1987, she told "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. for the disk. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. Take the larger view. Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . Everyone knows where they were when they heard. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM, 1945-90, edited Christopher As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. It was a visit warmly welcomed by President Reagan, with a resplendent state nner on the first evening. 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. 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. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. 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. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. Many hated her. She became deaf to all warning. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and Later that year she introduced the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fin, which prevented viewers and listeners hearing my voice. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. 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. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. "We have not There was only one state-approved answering machine available. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. 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. 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%. Of course, it's in politics that the shadow looms most clearly. If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. She all but erased his political legacy to stamp her own image on the nation, so Britain before and after Thatcher were two different countries. We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. 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. At Cheltenham the following month she They rallied around each other when times were hard. But now the history was what mattered. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, replied 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. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history. 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. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. Less noted . Several strong women on the continent have risen to the top, but thisBritish woman, in Britain of all places, became a phenomenon, first, throughher gender. The authors show just how much . That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. All rights reserved. At its heart must be an active programme to create good jobs and raise living standards. MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric 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. 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 . Was it cruelty? It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. Thatcher's Spitting Image puppet was different from the others; while other characters, such as Ronald Reagan and the pope, were exaggerated into fantasy versions of themselves, the rubber Maggie was just like the one who appeared on the news a stern, cold, matronly figure who had a slightly oedipal relationship with her cabinet. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". 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. But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. To the victors we saycongratulations. Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. I was on my own. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society" and is She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . Margaret Thatcher's government defended structured political and religious discrimination and political vetting in the north, legislated for political censorship and institutionalised, to a greater extent than ever before, collusion between British state forces and unionist death squads. Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. A Soviet . Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. More insidiously, it fathered amood of tolerated harshness. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during Reagan's presidency, and was close with him which Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. her maiden 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. Maggie! She preferred markets, and a strong but minimal central state that backed their rule. This was her last important public statement. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. 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. This speech was delivered soon after her taking office in 1979. 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. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . 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. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. The challenge for the left is to fashion new and genuinely progressive policies in an age of austerity, when more money is not the answer to any question. This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. 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. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. The core of this site is a massive database of MT's public statements of all kinds across the years (speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc), searchable by date, subject, importance, and keyword. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the I was a professional writer. speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she 100% Success rate. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom's first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. . He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. I don't see that. It was thoroughly "wet". Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. 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. It knew what Thatcher wanted. She made her maiden 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 was not a writer. 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. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. "Labour is stuck because they do not want to carry on the slimming down of the state and devolution of power but nor do they really want to reverse it," said one central Tory figure. At her first conference speech, she chastised the Labour Party on economic . It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. in his defence during the IranContra affair, told She gave it her best shot. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. And the miners. The impact that Hayek's writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. 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. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. This is a style whose absence is much missed. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. . Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . be a nation in retreat". She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. 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.". 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. The main names associated with Fatcha-bashing Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle deny that they relied so heavily on her for material. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office.
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