They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. At times the Conservative party is so anarchic as to appear almost ungovernable, like a plethora of pressure groups pushing pet causes rather than a united group ruthlessly focusing on political success. The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. Just look around. Secondly, the balance of power in industrial relations was shifted decisively in favour of employers. After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. 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. In 1976 it still did not help and in the same year they had to take a loan in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [] . Absurd or not, it does indeed seem alien not least to those born in the 1980s, the generation we shall always call Thatcher's children. In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. Thatcher exposed the sharp edges of class division in Britain and the strike of 1984/5 was as much a clash of values as it was about pit closures. But as weand others (including Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers) have shown, wider income differences reduce social mobility and make it harder for people with poorer backgrounds to do so. first television interview the following day. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. In retrospect, in much dissenting commentary there was often a taint of unexamined sexism. 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. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. I was on my own. Peggy Noonan. 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. Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) 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. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". We had had a strange relationship. Everyone knows that. And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.". This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. Lady Thatcher, you honor us by coming to the site of Sir Winston's pivotal speech, an event Westminster College has immortalized with the beautiful Winston Churchill Memorial. We still live in the land Margaret built. While she spoke of his example as a beacon, she knew very well that she was an important component of what is often attributed solely to him, and in the first instance "winning" the cold war. The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries. 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 . They're not Thatcher. Many hated her. 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. Women aren't always good for other women because the gender of a person matters a lot less than that person's actual beliefs. It isn't sad for anyone else. Until her final poll-tax hubris, she knew when swerving was the better part of valour and despite that famous one-liner, she was sometimes for turning. Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective. 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. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Union in a speech When I think of this memorial, I think of the words of Rupert Brooke, "that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.". News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. cent of cases. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. Look inside your own house, at the water coming out of the tap: once a public utility but, after Thatcher, the property of private companies, many foreign-owned. Mikhail Gorbachev, for one, learned the hard way. Hire writer now Order. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. 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. 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 . She became deaf to all warning. I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. Margaret Thatcher was not known for her sense of humour. 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. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. The authors show just how much . Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. ", As Matthew Parris evocatively put it in Monday's Times, "She rather liked men (preferring our company, perhaps, to that of women), [but] she thought us the weaker sex. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. It was thoroughly "wet". 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. 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. She lost seven cabinet ministers on the Europe question, a record that permeated the party for years afterwards. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just another one bites the dust " This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. "No, no, no". performance at a Press Conference afterwards. Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. But look at this typical difference between her and her imitators: where Cameron has charged into Europe, taking his party out of the influential European People's party of natural allies, making enemies and building no useful coalitions, it was she who signed the Single European Act, understanding its importance for British trade, careful to make allies as well as swinging her handbag. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. 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. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. 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!" 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. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, Yet the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper and is not exactly a totem of gender equality andfemale-friendliness. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). Back when we called her Maggie, when it seemed she would have her wish and "go on and on" in ruling the country, her opponents would lament some new step towards social ruin with the withering, two-word verdict: "Thatcher's Britain.". to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated She remained in power till I was 15. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. Had pollsters and the 24/7 media forced leaders to follow opinion, not lead it? 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. "Labour is stuck because they do not want to carry on the slimming down of the state and devolution of power but nor do they really want to reverse it," said one central Tory figure. One might even credit Thatcher with a willingness to jettison the old rules and conventions that used to prevent individuals deciding their own destiny. 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. 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. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. The main names associated with Fatcha-bashing Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle deny that they relied so heavily on her for material. Seizing her chariot's reins to drive it on recklessly, they lack her brains, experience and political skill. Meryl Streep's depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae. 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."