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. 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. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. departing Downing Street on 28 November. 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. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren't about getting the leader liked. 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. By 1990 it was transformed. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. Hire a Writer. Many are children of the Thatcher age. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. Later that year she introduced the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fin, which prevented viewers and listeners hearing my voice. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White "Maggie Thatcher," he said. 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. 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. November). It still does. Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. The US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. 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 . It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. 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. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. One might even credit Thatcher with a willingness to jettison the old rules and conventions that used to prevent individuals deciding their own destiny. This has been a terrible labour, she said. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. She gave it her best shot. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. It isn't sad for anyone else. Of course, it's in politics that the shadow looms most clearly. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. 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. Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. The 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her 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. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. It knew what Thatcher wanted. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. 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. 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. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. This is an especially pertinent problem given its heartfelt desire for redistribution of wealth. I don't see that. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest. at The Hague in May 1992. Less noted . In the prime Thatcher years they required a severity of will to carry through that would now, if called on, bewrapped in so many cycles of deluding spin as to persuade us it hadn't really happened. But she also provided great material. be a nation in retreat". 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. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. She became harder than hard. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. 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. 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. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. Action. She may have got it slightly wrong. of times. That did the trick.). A massive programme of social housing would be a good place to start, stimulating the economy. Much of any leader's record is unremarkable dross, and Thatcher was no exception. What's more, it was moulded to the wall as one commentator recalled and you had no right to change it, not without becoming entangled in a state-managed bureaucracy. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. or copyright prevents reproduction on the site. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. 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. 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. Chvez is gone, but the voters are likely to re-elect Chavismo on 14 April. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. 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. 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. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. Everyone knows that. But the choice captures her perfectly. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot (20 In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. Nobody, at least that I know of, objected to that observation on the ground that it was disrespectful to the ability of the Chavez family to mourn in peace. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. 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. 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. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. Reagan was received coolly, and the discussion was highly superficial, if only because the British side clearly did not care to engage on substance: meet for a serious discussion with a movie actor and a "Grade B" actor at that? Out! of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. This, too, we still live with. Thatcher's title is Baroness. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. 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. . verbatim and in context. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. 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. By the 1983 election she had sold off only Britoil and some council houses. Before the real Thatcher's election in 1979 she took lessons with a speech coach at the Royal National Theatre, hoping to make her voice more commanding and less "shrill" in broadcasts. The last time I met her was after all this was over. I just now watched the British Gas one again. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. 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. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. Hats. When I think of this memorial, I think of the words of Rupert Brooke, "that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.". 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. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. for turning. The cautious tactician was suppressed. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" Steel or Thomas why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. A strong, so strong, leader. 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. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. She considered European Commission president Jacques Delors a campaigner for . Each was characterised by her attention to detail. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. 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. But really, such statements were anything but, first because sweeping statements about genders are the opposite of gender equality and second because they revealed her real attitude towards women, which lay behind her notable lack of female-friendly policies, her utter lack of interest in childcare provision or positive action.
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