That's history, but what matters to us is her legacy now that her heirs and imitators rule in her wake. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office. one Any such objections would have been invalid. Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. This has been a terrible labour, she said. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . Privatisation did not feature in the Conservative election campaign, while the tougher approach to trade union reform had only really become evident since the winter of discontent, and even then was a gradual process. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. She worked to enhance its corporate power. 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.". Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. 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. It still does. 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. It chose her ina fit of desperation, hats and all though it quite liked the hats. The authors show just how much . November). People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. September 25, 2020. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) The relative wealth of the UK 1% had been falling steadily for 50 years when Thatcher took power in 1979; since then it has climbed steeply and is almost back to 1918 levels. 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. Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. 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. at The Hague in May 1992. 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. It was seen for what it was, nothing to do with economics, but purely an attempt to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers by wiping out the entire industry. No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997. Emery Evans . No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. Reagan was especially interested in Mrs Thatcher's domestic policy initiatives, and it was quickly established that the foreign policy views ran along parallel lines. 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. It isn't sad for anyone else. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. Each now seems banal. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. Ultimately, despite the despondent times of the Cold War and the waning confidence of the citizens, Margaret Thatcher delivered her eulogy speech in belief of President Ronald Reagan and used the rhetorical appeals of pathos, imagery, metaphor, and ethos to accomplish his presidency as successful. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. 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 This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. As a result, Labour authorities in eight or so British cities have set up fairness commissions to reduce income differences locally. In her eulogy for the former president, Thatcher uses specific structure, tone and diction, and word choices throughout her writing to . Everyone knows that. 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. She was, of course, the first and so far only female British prime minister, Jon Snow reiterated on Monday night, insinuating that this achievement should in general be celebrated, never mind the specifics of her leadership. This was most evident in the shooting dead of three unarmed IRA activists in Gibraltar in March 1988. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. Steely, certainly. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. What will not be forgotten? We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. 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. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. 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. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. There are more than 8,000. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. This does lead to divisions. Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. Tasteless." Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. 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. In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". They are acolytes of a raw Thatcher cult they have rough-hewn and exaggerated in their own image. The government's welfare bill has been swollen by tax credits and housing benefit caused by the labour market reforms and council house sales of the 1980s. Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. It knew what Thatcher wanted. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. Yet by the autumn of 1981 they had made her so unpopular that bets were being taken at the October party conference that she would be "gone by Christmas". Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. Following several small strokes she announced, in March 2002, that her career as a speechmaker had ended. 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. 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. She invited the first television interview the following day, euphoric 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. The woman dubbed as the Iron Lady during her premiership made her last tearful speech as the leader of the country from the doorstep of . Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. rejecting Commission proposals at the Rome European Council with the words 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. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. Here is a selection of the best writing from commentators, politicians and journalists on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in power - and on her continuing impact in the time following her downfall, as figures from across the political spectrum examine the legacy of one of the most important political figures from the last half-century, this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama, key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War, publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq, the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez, the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper, Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers, nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth, decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality, intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy, Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s, "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . As far as her supporters are concerned, this radical transformation worked. Speaking personally, it was a personal privilege beyond measure to have witnessed and participate in the blossoming of the special ties that continued throughout her entire time in office. Maybe it was the sound of the estuary pronunciation robbing her of her aspirational airs, a prototype of the Bouquet/Bucket joke. and I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here. She was among the first Western leaders to Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. So what caused this great divide, with one side a fountain of fresh ideas and the other struggling for new inspiration? Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. The great contradiction in her politics was that someone who yearned for the certainties of small-town shopkeeper economics helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance that is still an ironic positive legacy of her time in power. Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. for the disk. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them. 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. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. She wanted to win, but did not put much faith in the quick smile. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. This was her last important public statement. The main names associated with Fatcha-bashing Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle deny that they relied so heavily on her for material. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. wrong with politics? steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. Secondly, the balance of power in industrial relations was shifted decisively in favour of employers. That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. At its heart must be an active programme to create good jobs and raise living standards. . The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". 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 . The Independent has the story. The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. They married the personality and belief to action. But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . Published: Sunday 21st February 2021. 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. On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly about the environment and climate change. 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. 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. 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. Hire a Writer. verbatim and in context. Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. We Americans will not see you again in our time, but we will never forget you. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. 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. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". It was a Charles I moment in British history. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. When I started knocking on Highland doors in May 1983, two things struck me more than any other. While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. Sent Bobby Sands to an Irish hero's grave without a blink. talked of "Victorian Values". A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. This speech was delivered soon after her taking office in 1979. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. 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. Many of today's more controversial benefits, such as disability, date back to the 80s. Many hated her. TRIBUTES were paid last night to Sir Bernard Ingham, the longstanding press secretary to Margaret Thatcher and a columnist in The Yorkshire Post until just a few weeks ago. Words. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. We were wary of this. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. She made one We liked disliking her. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. 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. 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. Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". Two especially forceful and committed leaders on the world stage at the same time: this was critical and key to ending the cold war, permitting the reunification of Germany, the consolidation of the EU and drawing our two nations together in a historic cooperation. 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.". It made minor savings at best and was, as the . All can agree that Margaret Thatcher changed the heart of British politics more than any politician since Clement Attlee. 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. 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. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. 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. 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." a But this didn't come without a price. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. 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. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. The woman, however, changed. 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." 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. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. Gaze at the telephone. She became deaf to all warning. By John Cassidy. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. So instead: "I put it to her that we would be saving money." A week later she spoke But Thatcher was still cautious. Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. By raising the pay of their own staff to a minimum of the living wage, they have set an example which a growing number of large private-sector employers have followed. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave Back when we called her Maggie, when it seemed she would have her wish and "go on and on" in ruling the country, her opponents would lament some new step towards social ruin with the withering, two-word verdict: "Thatcher's Britain.". Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . More insidiously, it fathered amood of tolerated harshness. Behind "omnishambles" headlines, her revolution is being pushed forward on new fronts in schools, health, planning, policing, probation and welfare. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. All Rights Reserved. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." 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. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. It destroyed the public's power to determine via parliament the services and prices of gas, electricity, telephone. Alamat kami. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. 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. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. But now the history was what mattered. She was immensely brisk. 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. 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. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. Perhaps this is unsurprising: four years ago Ed Miliband sneered at "nudge" economics as something "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". We might now be taking stock, post credit crunch, of our losses and gains since the 1986 deregulation of the City, but it is doubtful that we will ever undo her legacy. Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche.