"Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. Farewelling Baroness Margaret Thatcher in a proper fashion is a difficult task: she left such a deep imprint upon the world that assessing its importance demands volumes analyzing her beliefs and paying proper tribute. There are more than 8,000. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. "Being powerful is like being a lady. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". What's more, it was moulded to the wall as one commentator recalled and you had no right to change it, not without becoming entangled in a state-managed bureaucracy. A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. . Thank you, too, Margaret. 'I was there': Margaret Thatcher 'not for turning', 1980 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. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. Few would argue that they have not endured. On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. The former reporter, who was 90, died with his family around him yesterday lunchtime, a statement said. deeply felt eulogy, filmed in advance and relayed by video link to screens in the National Cathedral in Washington. The Thatcher Papers - Churchill Archives Centre This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. The spell of community. 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. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. Hewrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died. For the most part, it has not been undone. The British inflation was in 1975 up at 24, 11% [] and with the union's constant claim for higher salaries, nobody expected it to drop to a normal level. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren't about getting the leader liked. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. (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. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. It led to riots that nobody needed. 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. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly about the environment and climate change. Thatcher is remembered for her achievements, but more for a presence, which was wrapped up with being a woman. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. Any attempts at revisionism do no favours to her, women or feminism. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." My dad, I suspect, did. 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. She was able to reach Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician Emery Evans . It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. 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. 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. By 1987, anti-Tory tactical voting had taken hold. 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. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave making her big speech the following day as scheduled. But the choice captures her perfectly. November). Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. Margaret Thatcher Essay first television interview the following day. 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 . 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. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. . The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. Here is a selection of the best writing from commentators, politicians and journalists on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in power - and on her continuing impact in the time following her downfall, as figures from across the political spectrum examine the legacy of one of the most important political figures from the last half-century, this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama, key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War, publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq, the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez, the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper, Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers, nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth, decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality, intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy, Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s, "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. 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. 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. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." She fervently believed the market would soon repair their loss. No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya, spoke 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. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and opportunities. She adopts an endearing and sentimental tone using ethos, repetition, and . But perhaps her greatest legacy was New Labour. For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. On Saturday, 27 February, he wrote in his diary: "PM getting great press went up to the [Capitol] Hill some of the senators tried to give her a bad time, she put them down firmly and with typical British courtesy.". For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. She, for one, never underestimated her friend from California, then a state of some 24 million. We liked disliking her. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . 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 has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. Less noted . In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough And we won back three we lost at by-elections. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". 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". speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". a new dominance from Brussels". Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. The speakers form a rollcall of the globe's most interesting thinkers: Amartya Sen, the Nobel-winning Indian economist; Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologist and another Nobel winner; and Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, who focused on land rights for the poor. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. Far from "smashing the glass ceiling", she was the aberration, the one who got through and then pulled the ladder up right after her. 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%. "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. The Tories triumphed, of course, and lost only two sitting MPs Hamish Gray and the social-security scrounger-bashing Iain Sproat, who vacated his marginal Aberdeen seat and headed for the Scottish Borders, only to suffer defeat there at the hands of the Alliance. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke 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. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? 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. The evidence shows that greater equality provides the foundation on which higher standards of social wellbeing can be built. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom's first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. . 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. Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. It was a visit warmly welcomed by President Reagan, with a resplendent state nner on the first evening. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Scotland was her mission impossible. 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. But she became a very effective one. In short, miners believed in society. 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. Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". By John Cassidy. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. 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.". It never was. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. 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. On the same edition of Channel 4 News, Louise Mensch named only three successful female politicians as part of her defence ofThatcher and only one of those was a Conservative. She made her maiden This is not the Highland way. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. 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. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. Miners were a hardy race of people who faced constant danger in the cause of mining coal but underneath that they were caring, sensitive individuals with a commitment to the communities in which they lived. To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. 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. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. which revealed a good deal as to her political But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. She was catapulted into the Conservative leadership by a small group of ideologues centred around a thinktank, determined to roll back the statist ideas that dominated Britain after the postwar Attlee government. Thatcher's Bruges speech 'not anti-EU' - former aide - BBC News This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. 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! 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.
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