Thatcher's reign helped to inspire alternative comedy by creating a generation so bereft of hope that they started putting on gigs just for the sake of something to do. Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche. ", 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. TRIBUTES were paid last night to Sir Bernard Ingham, the longstanding press secretary to Margaret Thatcher and a columnist in The Yorkshire Post until just a few weeks ago. She remained in power till I was 15. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. We were wary of this. 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. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. 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. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! 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. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. As a physician, she has been a vocal advocate for a single-payer healthcare system that would . The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. 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. The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. Thatcher's title is Baroness. 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. 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. Accounts vary. 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. True, Labour, James Callaghan and the unions played their part by blocking Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife attempt to create German or Nordic co-operation between unions and industry that might have rescued unions from Thatcher's crushing. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), who in 1979 would become Great Britain's first female Prime Minister, traveled to the United States and Canada in September 1975, seven months after becoming the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, then out of power. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". 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. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. Getting the record straight. We liked disliking her. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she Words. 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. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought toannihilate. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. During Margaret Thatcher's rise to the top, he was one of the backroom figures whose words helped create her reputation as the Iron Lady. 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. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. 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." 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 . Many of today's more controversial benefits, such as disability, date back to the 80s. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. "No, no, no". Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly about the environment and climate change. 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. Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. The cautious tactician was suppressed. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? If they have no bread, let them eat from food banks that's Thatcherism, the legacy we are still to bury before it buries us. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". In truth, Thatcher is one of the clearest examples of the fact that a successful woman doesn't always mean a step forward for women. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. As a result, Labour authorities in eight or so British cities have set up fairness commissions to reduce income differences locally. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. Much of any leader's record is unremarkable dross, and Thatcher was no exception. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. In 1984 Britain had 186 working coalmines and approximately 170,000 coalminers. "Yes and that was one of the many weird things about her," smirked Alexei Sayle. No gloves, or hats, except for royalty or at funerals, but feet on the table, whisky glass at hand, into the small hours of solitude, for want of male cronies in the masculine world she dominated for all her 11yearsin power. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. At a party leaders' meeting in Washington, DC in 1985, Prime Minister Thatcher spent all day in the House of Commons, then boarded Concorde and flew to Washington to participate until late into the evening; she took such policy co-operation very seriously. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. The government's welfare bill has been swollen by tax credits and housing benefit caused by the labour market reforms and council house sales of the 1980s. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. It led to riots that nobody needed. 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. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. 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. November). of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." There were sporadic resurrections. This has been a terrible labour, she said. 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. But perhaps her greatest legacy was New Labour. Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Two especially forceful and committed leaders on the world stage at the same time: this was critical and key to ending the cold war, permitting the reunification of Germany, the consolidation of the EU and drawing our two nations together in a historic cooperation. . Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. 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. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." as far as can be known. "Maggie! The main names associated with Fatcha-bashing Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle deny that they relied so heavily on her for material. 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." She invited the 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.". Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives Hugo Young was a political columnist forthe Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. Superlatives can be agreed: a remarkable first woman PM; the first winner of three elections in a row; brave; tough; relentless; clever; sleeplessly driven by a self-confident conviction that overawed her enemies. But Thatcher was still cautious. Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful 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. Weakening the power of trade unions was not only essential to her project, but several studies suggest that their continued weakness may be an important part of the reason why inequality has not declined in the intervening decades. The author uses this idea of freedom in her writing to allow the audience to feel and understand the mission of Reagan--"to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism" (6-7). Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. 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. 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. Britain's record on innovation and investment have been extremely poor, while the hollowing out of manufacturing left the economy over-dependent on the de-regulated City. 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 As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. But the sense of community evaporated. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. "What's going on there, mate?" 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. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Get over her! Rather, she was a classic example of a certain kind of conservative woman who believed that all women should pull themselves up just as she had done, conveniently overlooking that not all women are blessed with the privileges that had been available to her, such as a wealthy and supportive husband and domestic help. After all, the right began to refocus only after Tony Blair's second landslide, when people began to recognise they would not drift back into power. And then, perversely, would come the throwaway, sign-off remark to the effect of: "At least you know where you stand with Maggie she hates us and we hate her.". We Americans will not see you again in our time, but we will never forget you. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. Margaret Thatcher's landmark Bruges speech about the future of Europe was never intended to push the UK towards the exit, the man who wrote it says. 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. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. Indeed a person with achemistry that repelled almost all thesignificant males in Edward Heath's cabinet who could never become theparty leader. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society. 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 . 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. 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. 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 . John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. "Being powerful is like being a lady. We are all on our own. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? Not all writers were against her. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. So look around this kingdom of ours, at a devolved Scotland contemplating independence a state of affairs that owes much to Thatcher's antagonistic relationship with that country. 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. Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. North sea oil was squandered when it should have seeded new industries. Sharp definition, hard edges, no effort at fuzzy contours (David Cameron, take note). (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Far from "smashing the glass ceiling", she was the aberration, the one who got through and then pulled the ladder up right after her. Action. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We But Thatcher was a naturally, perhaps incurably, divisive figure. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. She went to a fee-paying school and to Oxford at her father's expense, gliding easily into the upper echelons of student politics. 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".