Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers. She was able to reach At its heart must be an active programme to create good jobs and raise living standards. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. At its best, that has meant a mood of freedom and choice that has made these islands a brighter, less drab place than they once were. But the choice captures her perfectly. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. 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. Hire a Writer. . 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". It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. To project the ideas of strength and . Gillian Anderson's Portrayl of Margaret Thatcher's Voice in 'The Crown She describes Reagan as her friend and continues to narrate his good acts in America during his presidency. 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. She defended Ronald Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to 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. Speech to Conservative Party Conference - Margaret Thatcher If you want anything done, ask a woman.". In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. 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. She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. Great speeches: Margaret Thatcher | World | The Guardian The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. the British Embassy in Paris and stated It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. We liked disliking her. In 1976 it still did not help and in the same year they had to take a loan in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [] . Behind "omnishambles" headlines, her revolution is being pushed forward on new fronts in schools, health, planning, policing, probation and welfare. Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable in his defence during the IranContra affair, told outlook at the time. She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. A massive programme of social housing would be a good place to start, stimulating the economy. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." Indeed, many of the policy innovations associated with Thatcher had already been pioneered by her predecessor. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. 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 . The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. They are acolytes of a raw Thatcher cult they have rough-hewn and exaggerated in their own image. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. A couple of days later on the 11th, Margaret Thatcher the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote an eulogy for Ronald Reagan. Margaret Thatcher Quotes (Author of The Downing Street Years) - Goodreads Margaret Thatcher Essay | Best Writing Service 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. 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 . Leaving aside the detail that the word "feminist" came into existence in 1895, comfortably in Chanel's lifetime, the woman who valued femininity above all other qualities in a woman and was heavily involved with the Nazis, including a wartime relationship with German officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, could not, in any circumstances, be described as a feminist. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya, spoke We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. as far as can be known. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' When the mourners gather for Baroness Thatcher's funeral tomorrow, one important figure from her political past will be . There was only one state-approved answering machine available. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. 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 'the Lady's not for turning' - YouTube Beleagured Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher makes pun during the 1981 Conservative Party conference speech: "the lady's not for turning" she says to her crit. Without the Falklands/Malvinas war, which exploited nationalism (as Argentinian dictator Galtieri did) and which Labour would not oppose, she would never have been re-elected in 1983. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. And the miners. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen. By John Cassidy. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. From her start in politics, Thatcher often attracted sexist critiques for the way she spoke, with many it dubbing her voice "shrill" and "patronizing." Television critic Clive James even compared . for turning. The evidence shows that greater equality provides the foundation on which higher standards of social wellbeing can be built. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. The latest pit to close, Maltby in Yorkshire, still has a death and general purpose fund to help fellow miners and their families in times of hardship. Accounts vary. 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. By 1990 it was transformed. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. 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 . A strong pound crippled exports and emptied factories. Thatcher's title is Baroness. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. More than once the view was advanced that it was a pity the IRA had not succeeded in their ultimate objective when they bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. By the close of her premiership, he was probably the most trusted member of her political team at Downing Street, and he left Number Ten with her. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. She was immensely brisk. In the pantheon of this comedian's attacks on Thatcher, it was a retort that probably won't be treasured longer than the best lines from The Young Ones. Being a woman is undoubtedly one of the features, possibly the most potent, that makes her ascent to power memorable, 25 years on, in a way that applied to no man. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . 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. Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. Sharp definition, hard edges, no effort at fuzzy contours (David Cameron, take note). She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. performance at a Press Conference afterwards. It destroyed the public's power to determine via parliament the services and prices of gas, electricity, telephone. Thatcher jokes were big business, from Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, to Harry Enfield's satire of Thatcher's children with his Loadsamoney character. In her thoughtful and prescient remarks, the Prime Minister reached back into history to recall how far the English-Speaking Peoples had come since victory in . Union in a speech Without it, she would have been nothing. Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. But, as the prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard says: "For things to remain the same, everything must change.". She invited the Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. . MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric She adopts an endearing and sentimental tone using ethos, repetition, and . 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. The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. Margaret Thatcher's Eulogy for Ronald Reagan- Rhetorical Analysis Essay Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". How dare her apologists and beneficiaries of her legacy refer to trade unions like the NUM as "corrupt" in the face of their bonuses and tax cuts! There were sporadic resurrections. Gaze at the telephone. Margaret Thatcher was not known for her sense of humour. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. 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. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. 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. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". 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. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. Throw the Lib Dems into the mix and it becomes highly combustible. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. Had Jim Callaghan won the 1979 election, he too would have faced the challenge of how to modernise an economy beset by high inflation, weak management and poor industrial relations. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. 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. She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. The US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. She also put forward the idea of "a vast . Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. Later that year she introduced the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fin, which prevented viewers and listeners hearing my voice. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. Her Irish policy failed miserably. Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. The spell of community. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders. One leading Tory thinker said current academic concepts such as evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics were fundamentally rightwing; another said disruptive digital technology liberated individuals against powerful behemoths which may be true, but some of the most striking online advances harness the collective spirit. Hewrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died. Margaret Thatcher Fast Facts | CNN Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. When she walked into Downing Street promising harmony instead of discord, only one in seven children was poor and Britain was more equal than at any time in modern history. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. National Press Club Luncheon Speakers: Margaret Thatcher (Recorded Tributes paid as Sir Bernard Ingham dies, aged 90 - PressReader Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. 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. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. MT gave her first Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom's first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. . As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." 'The Crown': Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth's Key Conflicts But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Any such objections would have been invalid. cent of cases. This is the area where we need to make progress not just in restoring strong local government, but in understanding that democracy means more than a Westminster vote. 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. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. 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 . Nor, contrary to myth, did Thatcherism emerge fully formed in May 1979. I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". led Michael Heseltine to run against her for the party leadership. 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. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. with the European Community when she All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White speech in the House of Commons, her Secondly, the balance of power in industrial relations was shifted decisively in favour of employers. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the 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. To the victors we saycongratulations. Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. Buy the CD-ROM from this link or find one Margaret Thatcher Eulogy Rhetorical Analysis - Peachy Essay Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." Sue Gray used to be my boss. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. 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. 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. 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. 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. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". June 5, 1992 - Is named a life peer on the Queen's honor list. She gave it her best shot. 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. The core of this site is a massive database of MT's public statements of all kinds across the years (speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc), searchable by date, subject, importance, and keyword. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. 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 pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. It led to riots that nobody needed. 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. But she exploited her luck. Hugo Young was a political columnist forthe Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher - The Telegraph 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 . her maiden In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. If the Falklands war was the making of Thatcher, then the poll tax was her achilles heel not least in Scotland. 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. There are more than 8,000. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. The price we all continue to pay for Thatcherite policies is to live in a less cohesive and more antisocial society, in which community life is weaker, people feel less able to trust each other and fewer of those in government have the experience and compassion to represent or understand the vast majority. one announced that White On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. 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. Emery Evans . In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". 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. (MT gave up public An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time. 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 warned that she was not At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy?