In rich societies such as the UK, what makes most difference to the real quality of our lives is the quality of community life and social interaction. But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing ahat. She was catapulted into the Conservative leadership by a small group of ideologues centred around a thinktank, determined to roll back the statist ideas that dominated Britain after the postwar Attlee government. As I see it, and as one who had the pleasure of knowing both, they would recognize the huge opportunity created by the presence of each in the respective national and international policy-making role. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. The cautious tactician was suppressed. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. The financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. 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. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. 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. 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. The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. It was a visit warmly welcomed by President Reagan, with a resplendent state nner on the first evening. "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. Full employment had been ditched in 1976, while Labour had introduced monetary targets and cash limits for Whitehall departments while Denis Healey was at the Treasury. 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' 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. The word "free" is used to help the audience Look at the cars on the road, none made by the old, nationally-owned British Leyland and only few by the British marques that once dominated but which went the way of much of British industry unable to survive the chill wind of "market forces", another phrase which filled the air back then. Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. To her detractors, Thatcher is the prime minister who wiped out more than 15% of Britain's industrial base with her dogmatic monetarism, squandered the once-in-a-lifetime windfall of North Sea oil on unemployment pay and tax cuts, and made the UK the unbalanced, unequal country it is today. 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 . A couple of days later on the 11th, Margaret Thatcher the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote an eulogy for Ronald Reagan. In 1980, I made several fast round trips to London, Paris and Bonn, and, on each occasion, had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Thatcher. 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. There are more than 8,000. The Lady forced the opposition party to accommodate itself to the new, Thatcherite settlement in which the market would rule unless stated otherwise. 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. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." "Comes here every week to water them flowers." It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. As leader she was initially hyper-cautious. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. 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. "Maggie! Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. 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. 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. of times. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not 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. to secure international action to repair the damaged ozone layer. But Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate, and the long, substantive lunch seemed to energize both future world leaders. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political Any such objections would have been invalid. "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. In a twitter of panic, Labour shadow ministers sent out pleas yesterday: "Hoping all Labour supporters will respond with dignity and respect to news of Baroness Thatcher's death." Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. That did the trick.). The Iron Lady had a green thumband a surprisingly green philosophy. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising Thatcher and Reagan went on to facilitate a colossal transfer of wealth from poor to rich, leading to the world economic crash we now witness. 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. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It is not true that Thatcher didn't care about the media. But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. But growth rates in the decades since her period in office have been lower than during those that preceded her; nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth. 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. Margaret Thatcher's 1980 speech was written by playwright Ronnie Miller, and Julia recalls that the night before delivering the speech she had a huge row with him about the content. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that Words. The last time I met her was after all this was over. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you. be a nation in retreat". These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. Margaret Thatcher is being remembered as the prime minister who remade Britain's economy, the "Iron Lady" who stood up to communism and who fought and won a war in the distant South Atlantic . It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. To project the ideas of strength and . performance at a Press Conference afterwards. 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. On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. In 11 years, Thatcher promoted only one woman to her cabinet, preferring instead to elevate men whom Spitting Image memorably and, in certain instances, accurately, described as "vegetables". The papers date from Margaret Thatcher's childhood to the end of her life, and include tens of thousands of photographs, as well as a vast collection of press cuttings, and many audio and video tapes of public and private events. Lady Thatcher, you honor us by coming to the site of Sir Winston's pivotal speech, an event Westminster College has immortalized with the beautiful Winston Churchill Memorial. 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. performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the In November 1978, Hannaford and I organized a European fact-finding tour for Reagan, and the first stop was London. Police charges against picketing union printers in Wapping enabled the Murdoch empire to flourish, ensuring their power and hers. Oxford CD-ROM explains how the statements were assembled and edited Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. 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. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. 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. On the same edition of Channel 4 News, Louise Mensch named only three successful female politicians as part of her defence ofThatcher and only one of those was a Conservative. It was not interested in a resolution. 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. 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. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. 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. It's interesting, though, that even when comedians try to be political, they can never really land a punch on David Cameron, Nick Clegg or George Osborne. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. a new dominance from Brussels", the Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . In a world where most media talking heads come from the top few percent of income earners, unions are not only important in wage bargaining, they also provide some of the few well-informed voices whose job it is to speak on behalf of the less well-paid. Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture . She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. On Saturday, 27 February, he wrote in his diary: "PM getting great press went up to the [Capitol] Hill some of the senators tried to give her a bad time, she put them down firmly and with typical British courtesy.". Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. I don't see that. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). June 30, 1992 - Swearing . Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher. 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. We watched as her high heels went click-click-click across the stones of the Acropolis and the cement floors of Tito's steel mills. In 1976 it still did not help and in the same year they had to take a loan in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [] . We Americans will not see you again in our time, but we will never forget you. announced that White Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. 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.". rejecting Commission proposals at the Rome European Council with the words 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." She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". Perhaps she had just come inside. Well, everything really, even her name. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. They built and provided their own welfare facilities and, well before today's welfare state was built, miners created their own welfare systems to alleviate hardship. morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. She undoubtedly rescued the prestige of the country from its postwar nadir, but at a high cost to the generosity of its political and social culture. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. Not the loss of imperial markets, not lazy management, not the education system, not the decline of the industrial ethic: bitter men standing on platforms and asking for a show of hands to down tools were solely to blame. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. Of course, it's in politics that the shadow looms most clearly. Her onslaught on the trade unions left those movements pale imitations of their former selves, too weak to resist the drive to the "flexible labour market" which has seen Britain become the home of what one senior Labour figure calls "crappy jobs", with low pay and no protection. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. It was a Charles I moment in British history. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support.
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