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. An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. But there were also cuts for basic-rate taxpayers: the 1988 budget, for example, cut the top rate of tax from 60% to 40% and the standard rate from 27% to 25%. But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). It was seen for what it was, nothing to do with economics, but purely an attempt to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers by wiping out the entire industry. They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. Hire a Writer. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. A growing body of research now shows that the quality of social relations is among the most powerful influences on the happiness, health and wellbeing of populations in the rich countries. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. Both were successful women who could play the flirt card when it suited them, but ultimately had little interest in being kind to their own sex; Thatcher especially resented being defined by her gender. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . 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. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. September 25, 2020. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. The Independent has the story. 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. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". Get over her! When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. a new dominance from Brussels", the In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. Take the larger view. 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. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. talked of "Victorian Values". As Danny Dorling says in his 2004 study of the rise in violence: "Those who perpetrated the social violence that was done to the lives of young men starting some 20 years ago [the mid-80s] are the prime suspects for most of the murders in Britain." 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. 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. Union in a speech 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. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . That was the daunting task Margaret Thatcher set herself when she arrived in Downing Street in May 1979 at the end of a traumatic decade that had seen a three-day week, inflation topping 25%, a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the winter of discontent. Behind "omnishambles" headlines, her revolution is being pushed forward on new fronts in schools, health, planning, policing, probation and welfare. she Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? On one visit, our campaign chairman, William J Casey, later director of the CIA, came along, and we had a fruitful meeting at 10 Downing Street. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". The woman, however, changed. Perhaps Labour would benefit from another defeat, given the danger of taking power unprepared and turning into a zombie government, like the tragedy unfurling in France. But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. A week later she spoke It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. These include, "We have to show them that we're better than they are", and "Women can get into corners that men can't reach!" 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. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. first television interview the following day. Only today are we facing the cost. 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. I just now watched the British Gas one again. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. . 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. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". 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". For the most part, it has not been undone. . Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. Thatcher's title is Baroness. Simon Heffer, journalist, historian and friend of Margaret Thatcher, recommends the best books to read to gain an understanding of the United Kingdom's first female prime ministerand explains why she was the most influential British leader of the modern era. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. 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. . Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. . Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, 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. 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. She invited the 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. 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 . There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." In 1990, Margaret Thatcher emerged as one of the first world leaders to champion climate science, issuing a call to action to fight manmade global warming at the Second World Climate Conference hosted at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Sue Gray used to be my boss. But Thatcher was still cautious. On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest. History, Sample Essay. This, too, we still live with. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. 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. 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. speech in the House of Commons, her 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. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. We still live in the land Margaret built. It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. If the Falklands war was the making of Thatcher, then the poll tax was her achilles heel not least in Scotland. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. 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. It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. 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. The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . Published: Sunday 21st February 2021. She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. Women aren't always good for other women because the gender of a person matters a lot less than that person's actual beliefs. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. Nelson travelled to South Africa where he helped negotiate a deal that saw the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance acquire AK-47 automatic rifles, pistols, grenades, and RPG rocket launchers in late 1987 or early 1988. 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. She fervently believed the market would soon repair their loss. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Reagan would often hasten to remind those paying tribute to his cold war strategy that it was, in the strictest sense of the term, a team effort. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Elton has previously said that he did two minutes about Thatcher and two hours about his knob, and all anyone ever remembered was the Thatcher material. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. Not all writers were against her. Steely, certainly. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. Hire writer now Order. The Big Bang of City deregulation, the Tell Sid scramble for buying and selling shares, the sense that money is the highest value, wealth the greatest sign of worth all these were hallmarks of the Thatcher era in its mid-80s pomp. They are a more energetic and impressive group than their predecessors, often with experience outside politics that makes them impatient and independent-minded. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's Would we like her back? Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. This does lead to divisions. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . Meanwhile, you struggle to identify deep thinkers in party ranks beyond a couple of veteran stalwarts; even the left's thinktanks appear moribund or merely harking back to an idealised past. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. Across Yorkshire or south Wales, Kent or Nottinghamshire, there are villages that have never recovered from the closure of coal mines, ordered by a Thatcher who ruled there was no place for pits that were not "economically viable", regardless of the social consequences. But really, such statements were anything but, first because sweeping statements about genders are the opposite of gender equality and second because they revealed her real attitude towards women, which lay behind her notable lack of female-friendly policies, her utter lack of interest in childcare provision or positive action. 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. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. They rallied around each other when times were hard. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. In January 1976, Thatcher delivered a speech at Kensington Town Hall in London, and spoke about the Iron Curtain the political boundary that separated Europe during World War II. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . 100% Success rate. I was on my own. Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. This has been a terrible labour, she said. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. 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 There are still some great comics doing political material, with Mark Steel and Mark Thomas flying the flag of alternative comedy, while people such as Josie Long and Chris Coltrane find the funny in activism. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. 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. In January 1983 she 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. 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. Rishi Sunak 20 July 2022 9:30pm. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. So we agreed to reactivate the back channel. It never was. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality.