For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. Great speeches: Margaret Thatcher | World | The Guardian 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 milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. with the European Community when she The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office. Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. She was able to reach There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. 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. This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. Thatcher's threat to butcher the mining industry, destroy the fabric of mining communities and in particular the trade union to which miners had a bond of loyalty, was met with the fiercest resistance any government has met in peacetime. She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. That's history, but what matters to us is her legacy now that her heirs and imitators rule in her wake. Tributes paid as Sir Bernard Ingham dies, aged 90 - PressReader Yet, as the heated benefits debate showed last week, Labour is trapped by history bereft of fresh ideas and, when tentatively offering proposals, strangled by the most stifling conservatism. she warned that she was not This does lead to divisions. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable I don't see that. As the coalition sets about shrinking the welfare state, it's still embarked on Thatcher's project of rolling back the frontiers of the state, dismantling the settlement that held from 1945 until it unravelled in the 1970s. The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. We still live in the land Margaret built. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. which revealed a good deal as to her political Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. Margaret Thatcher - Quotes, Death & Life - Biography The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. The Lady forced the opposition party to accommodate itself to the new, Thatcherite settlement in which the market would rule unless stated otherwise. Arguably, it was not the sale of council houses that was the problem, but the failure to replace the stock and maintain a sufficient supply of affordable homes. 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 . Keith Joseph was her guru. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". Buy the CD-ROM from this link or find one She considered European Commission president Jacques Delors a campaigner for . 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. 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. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. National Press Club Luncheon Speakers: Margaret Thatcher (Recorded We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. Britain's relative decline came to an end, although that was more due to slowdowns in countries such as France and Germany than an acceleration in UK productivity growth. It's true that whenever there's a major news story, millions of people immediately begin strip-mining it for puns and bon mots, making it harder for professional comics to develop focused, funny material that nobody's heard before. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. 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. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied 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. Hewrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. No sign they learned from her that markets don't move in to fill the gaps when the state is rolled back not then, not now. a new dominance from Brussels", the Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. 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! She may have got it slightly wrong. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. Any such objections would have been invalid. Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister 1979-1990 - ThoughtCo She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. ", 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. Alamat kami. At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. 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 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. This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn't care if it happened or not. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. September 25, 2020. Climate, freedom and denial: What "Green Thatcherism" teaches us today Margaret Thatcher - HISTORY The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". 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. This is a style whose absence is much missed. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, replied Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. It was a Charles I moment in British history.