She added layers of her own to this intimacy, directing the creation of a single European market that surrendered important national powers to the collective. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . a new dominance from Brussels". Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . It still does. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. "We have not They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. 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. Well, everything really, even her name. By 1990 it was transformed. It made minor savings at best and was, as the . The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . On 30 October 1990 she made the first of the And the single mums. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. be a nation in retreat". This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. Everything has its season. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. 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. The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. But the left also needs to look beyond the turbulent events in Europe to appreciate the speed of global change and the complications this creates for welfare-laden economies: the dynamos and innovators are increasingly found in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than France, Germany and Spain. 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. To the extent that there was an industrial strategy, it was to sell Britain as a destination for Japanese car companies and to shift the focus of the economy away from manufacturing towards financial services. Maybe my memory is fanciful. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. The news last week that they are instead considering cutting or freezing the minimum wage surely undermines any pretence that the government is acting either coherently or in the public interest. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." . morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. 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 . One thinks now of the closing words of her splendid 2004 eulogy of Ronald Reagan, and how those words so perfectly speak a tribute to her life and works: "We here still move in twilight. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. 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. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. Sayle recorded the song Get Me Mrs Thatcher, but says that in general he felt Thatcher jokes were a bit too easy, although he still shudders at the memory of a "wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s". in a statement the following morning (22 November), hours before she Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. She was among the first Western leaders to Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. This is an especially pertinent problem given its heartfelt desire for redistribution of wealth. 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. A friend of South African apartheid and mass murderers from Kissinger and Pinochet to the Khmer Rouge after they had killed two million Cambodians she was a zealous saleswoman for the arms industry. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Out!" I was just behind her at the civic museum in Dubrovnik when the local guide explained a model showing the elaborate system of ancient wells and tunnels that had provided the city with fresh water no matter how fierce the siege. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. 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.". She became harder than hard. At times the Conservative party is so anarchic as to appear almost ungovernable, like a plethora of pressure groups pushing pet causes rather than a united group ruthlessly focusing on political success. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. All Rights Reserved. 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. Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. The Lady forced the opposition party to accommodate itself to the new, Thatcherite settlement in which the market would rule unless stated otherwise. Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. Not all writers were against her. Thank you, too, Margaret. Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" of British politics who died Monday at the age of 87, is being lionized as the woman who tilted British domestic and economic policy to the right. By John Cassidy. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness? 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. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. 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. It knew what Thatcher wanted. Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. Firstly, control of inflation rather than the pursuit of full employment was the centrepiece of macro economic strategy. Meryl Streep's depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete 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. "No, no, no". 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. 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. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. 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. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political Hats. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. Nations need to know the big picture of where they belong and, coinciding with the Thatcher appearance at the top, clarity had apparently broken through the clouds of historic ambivalence. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. It was not interested in a resolution. The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. And he would credit the contribution of Helmut Kohl, who rose to power in Germany in part because of the influence of Thatcher and Reagan. Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. At Cheltenham the following month she The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. (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. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. 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. Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status. 1971 was the year of Ted Heath's Conservative government, which was trying to make huge savings to the budget. 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. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. In her eulogy for the former president, Thatcher uses specific structure, tone and diction, and word choices throughout her writing to . 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. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. For those miners and their families to be referred to as the "enemy within" by Thatcher was something they would never forgive and, if there is rejoicing at her death in those communities she set out to destroy, it can only be understood against this background. Words. We were not unique in such a response but she failed to appreciate that Scots are balanced, canny folk insofar as we have a well-developed chip on each shoulder. 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. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. Union in a speech Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per she warned that she was not Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. 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. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. ", This attitude that men are fun but dumb, women are smart but strident, a view of the sexes that seems to come straight out of a Judd Apatow film led to various quotes of hers that some like to twist into proof that Thatcher was an unwitting feminist. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she Reagan, for one, recognized the importance of Margaret Thatcher's presence as British prime minister, but would caution any discussionpartnerthat Pope John Paul played an equally important role. Miners had always known that eventually any of the colleries would close and were always prepared to accept that as a fact of life and find employment somewhere else within the industry, but Thatcher's attack was wholesale. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. Steely, certainly. She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. She was propped up by police who were encouraged to brutality against not only strikers but communities of colour, already hardest hit by unemployment: police powers were enhanced and their racism given free rein, especially with stop and search; CS gas was used on the mainland for the first time. For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. 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. She worked to enhance its corporate power. The welfare state, with its unemployment and housing benefits and free healthcare, actually protected wages: employers could not force workers to accept low pay or unpaid overtime because of the job's healthcare provision, as they do in the US. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. November). 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." I was a professional writer. But, as the prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard says: "For things to remain the same, everything must change.". 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. . If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide itcannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history. Following several small strokes she announced, in March 2002, that her career as a speechmaker had ended. "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . Peggy Noonan. Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. 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. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. 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 were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. recommended by Simon Heffer. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. Each now seems banal. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually. 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 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. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. Plus there's the fact that comedy is now a big business, and there's less money in sharp satire than gentle observation. a new dominance from Brussels", the Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. But awoman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. 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. Throw the Lib Dems into the mix and it becomes highly combustible. If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. 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. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. 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. 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. That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. We had had a strange relationship. There had been Churchill and his defiance; there had been Kipling and his If; there had been her father in his grocer's shop in Grantham. But the sense of community evaporated. She was 87. Keith Joseph was her guru. cent of cases. The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives Thatcher came to power when the economy was approaching a moment of truth after three decades of poor performance relative to other western countries. Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. Indeed, many of the policy innovations associated with Thatcher had already been pioneered by her predecessor. She gave Nigel Lawson at the Treasury his head and was genuinely alarmed when he cut income tax to 40%. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. . Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. In fact, several countries have adopted these ideas with startlingly successful results; just changing the wording on some forms raised an extra 200m income tax in Britain, while personalised text messages drastically reduced the use of bailiffs to recover court fines. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. In November 1978, Hannaford and I organized a European fact-finding tour for Reagan, and the first stop was London. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. Council house sales and advertising campaigns that encouraged the public to buy shares in privatised companies were meant to broaden the appeal of capitalism. "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. In her 1982 party conference speech, Margaret Thatcher offered a prediction for the future: "How absurd it will seem in a few years' time that the state ran Pickfords removals and Gleneagles Hotel . It came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. 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. No single mother raising children was to be called "workless", skipping meals to feed them and forced to ditch them to submit to "workfare" or a starvation wage. 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. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. Had pollsters and the 24/7 media forced leaders to follow opinion, not lead it? 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. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. This is not the Highland way. In a eulogy by the former prime minister of Great Britain, Margret Thatcher honors the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the late president. 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.