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. Farewelling Baroness Margaret Thatcher in a proper fashion is a difficult task: she left such a deep imprint upon the world that assessing its importance demands volumes analyzing her beliefs and paying proper tribute. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. There are many reasons for this. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. As the coalition sets about shrinking the welfare state, it's still embarked on Thatcher's project of rolling back the frontiers of the state, dismantling the settlement that held from 1945 until it unravelled in the 1970s. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. Firstly, control of inflation rather than the pursuit of full employment was the centrepiece of macro economic strategy. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. 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. 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." Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. Selling off the family silver Harold Macmillan and later Labour called it, as Margaret Thatcher set about reversing the 1945 nationalisations that had put oil, gas, coal, electricity and an airline as well as a house removal company in public hands. Margaret Thatcher climbs over a house : r/funny Gaze at the telephone. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. 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. 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.". It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. I will know that we have finally broken from the kind of capitalism that she championed and which died in 2008 when we see workers elected on to company boards. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. One of the few direct hits scored in the modern era was when Alex Ross and James Herring remixed Nick Clegg's bizarre "I'm sorry" speech and turned it into a hilarious R&B tune. And for the people of Ireland, and especially the north, the Thatcher years were among some of the worst of the conflict. 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 . It was meant as a term of condemnation, a concise way of arguing that riots in the street or the devastation of a pit village were the inevitable features of this new land that had arisen in the 1980s, a country reshaped by the woman at the top. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. To project the ideas of strength and . Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . 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. 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. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and 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. In the 2004 eulogy in honor of the late president, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher uses a series of rhetorical devices such as parallelism, repetition, and ethos to convey the message in which Reagan was much more than an excellent president. 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. Sue Gray used to be my boss. The task of representing the White House usually was the role of the vice-president, but in this special case, the Reagans and the Bushes both attended. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher verbatim and in context. She was a radical conservative, known for dismantling nationalized industries and social services, weakening union power.She was also the first incumbent prime minister in the UK removed on a vote of their own party. The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . 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. "You see," she announced in her self-satisfied way, "it just goes to show what people can do when they have to. And in 1983, for the first time, children born in Britain to non-British parents were denied automatic citizenship, fostering further racism and discrimination in immigration policy. 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. As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress - Hillsdale College She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. 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". Animals and Pets Anime Art Cars and Motor Vehicles Crafts and DIY Culture, Race, and Ethnicity Ethics and Philosophy Fashion Food and Drink History Hobbies Law Learning and Education Military Movies Music Place Podcasts and Streamers Politics Programming Reading, Writing, and Literature Religion and Spirituality Science Tabletop Games . Handbag. 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. Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. 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. That's history, but what matters to us is her legacy now that her heirs and imitators rule in her wake. The welfare state set out to ensure that no one, in the UK at least, would starve or freeze to death, or suffer or die for lack of medical or other care. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. This does lead to divisions. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. This was most evident in the shooting dead of three unarmed IRA activists in Gibraltar in March 1988. led Michael Heseltine to run against her for the party leadership. Margaret Thatcher: Foreign Policy of Great Britain | Speech-Guru I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. The 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. 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. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. decision to resign. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. 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. she The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. The current crop of leaders are so dull, so ill-defined, so lacking in personality that it's almost impossible for comedians to rage against them. It led to riots that nobody needed. 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. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. 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. We still live in the land Margaret built. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. 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. This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. The Crown Struggles With Portrayal of Margaret Thatcher | Time Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. Real Analysis Solved Problems, Synthesis Essay Freedom Of Speech, Photography Dissertation Titles, Reflective Essay Writers Service Usa, Sample Of The Resume 4423 . Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. (Interestingly, Currie also recalled that when she approached Thatcher in 1988 to get approval for the world's first national breast-screening programme, she tried to appeal to the PM initially "as a woman" but that swiftly proved unsuccessful. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. They are acolytes of a raw Thatcher cult they have rough-hewn and exaggerated in their own image. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. The tragic upshot has been the steep erosion of wages for the powerless bottom half, as income, wealth and property is sucked up to the top. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. 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. 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. Given the global economic crisis, rampant corporate greed and growing inequality, this should be a time of great ferment, with endless policy proposals bubbling up to challenge the post-Thatcher consensus at a time of immense and unsettling change. 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. Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. But awoman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. What is really left by Thatcher to history? Any such objections would have been invalid. Margaret Thatcher's Strong Stance on Climate Change Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. The Man Whose Powerful Critique of Socialism Influenced Margaret Thatcher Thatcher is remembered for her achievements, but more for a presence, which was wrapped up with being a woman. 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. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually. A meeting in Downing Street had left the Pakistan leader besotted with the older woman's wisdom and generosity: '"I tell you, she's such a kind person.". Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. 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. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon.
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