"Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and Just look around. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. I was a professional writer. "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". recommended by Simon Heffer. . No homeless or disabled people need beg on the streets. She was able to reach 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. one 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. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied 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. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. While Labour was now "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", ambitious feminism wanted to be let in to the boardroom and every corridor of power that and little else is what they mean by changing the world. Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. Margaret Thatcher has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings. Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. 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. Take the larger view. It was thoroughly "wet". Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. Margaret Flowers is a leading activist, doctor, teacher, and co-founder of PopularResistance.org, a website that aims to inform and inspire grassroots movements around the world. 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. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke What is really left by Thatcher to history? How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning? with the European Community when she It's interesting, though, that even when comedians try to be political, they can never really land a punch on David Cameron, Nick Clegg or George Osborne. For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. 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. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. Getting the record straight. 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.". I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. 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. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. 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." press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. Without the Falklands/Malvinas war, which exploited nationalism (as Argentinian dictator Galtieri did) and which Labour would not oppose, she would never have been re-elected in 1983. The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. 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. studying Thatcher's speeches . Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. She forced us to decide what was truly important. But Labour is no less in thrall. Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. The evidence shows that greater equality provides the foundation on which higher standards of social wellbeing can be built. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? She made her remarks They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. 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. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . Maybe my memory is fanciful. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's At its heart must be an active programme to create good jobs and raise living standards. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. Thank you, too, Margaret. still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, As leader she was initially hyper-cautious. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship it's just not British. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. 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. Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. The novel may thrive in adversity and it was a general sense of dismay at the new world she was showing us that lured many writers into opposition. 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. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez: "To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.". In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? Today we have four coalmines and around 2,000 miners. Hire writer now Order. Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. The centralised statism that dominated politics for much of the 20th century, given its last pathetic gasp under the profligate government of Gordon Brown, ultimately failed the poor while proving financially unsustainable and unsuited to modern times. 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. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one Many hated her. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. a new dominance from Brussels", the with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . June 5, 1992 - Is named a life peer on the Queen's honor list. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. Given the global economic crisis, rampant corporate greed and growing inequality, this should be a time of great ferment, with endless policy proposals bubbling up to challenge the post-Thatcher consensus at a time of immense and unsettling change. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. She was among the first Western leaders to The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. She mesmerised us. Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" of British politics who died Monday at the age of 87, is being lionized as the woman who tilted British domestic and economic policy to the right. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. It was not interested in a resolution. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and entered the 1990s with its reputation enhanced. But these concrete achievements do not wholly explain why she still looms so large, large enough that not one but two current West End plays The Audience and Billy Elliot grant Thatcher a pivotal, if largely unsympathetic, role, whether seen or unseen. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she in his defence during the IranContra affair, told It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. Underestimating Ronald Reagan was an error committed by many of his critics and opponents; Reagan never minded a bit, thinking that being underestimated yielded him a significant advantage. But on their catastrophic economic policy, it's full-speed ahead into the concrete wall. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? This is an especially pertinent problem given its heartfelt desire for redistribution of wealth. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. for the disk. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. 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. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. This is a style whose absence is much missed. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. Only today are we facing the cost. It came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough Although the "right to buy" and the privatisation of utilities by selling shares to new small investors was often justified as giving rights to "the little people", the reality is that the less well-off fell ever further behind the rich. 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. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing ahat. 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. Today's Tories walk in Thatcher's footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. Interview by Benedict King. She gave it her best shot. 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. When I started knocking on Highland doors in May 1983, two things struck me more than any other. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . If you want anything done, ask a woman.". If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Peggy Noonan. Emery Evans . It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. 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.