But she also provided great material. We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". The price we all continue to pay for Thatcherite policies is to live in a less cohesive and more antisocial society, in which community life is weaker, people feel less able to trust each other and fewer of those in government have the experience and compassion to represent or understand the vast majority. Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing ahat. Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . be a nation in retreat". The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Hire writer now Order. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. . Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. 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. "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. The great contradiction in her politics was that someone who yearned for the certainties of small-town shopkeeper economics helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance that is still an ironic positive legacy of her time in power. "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. . 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. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that Selling off the family silver Harold Macmillan and later Labour called it, as Margaret Thatcher set about reversing the 1945 nationalisations that had put oil, gas, coal, electricity and an airline as well as a house removal company in public hands. Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. 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 Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. 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 . 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. 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. But Thatcher was still cautious. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. 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. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. But Thatcher was a naturally, perhaps incurably, divisive figure. Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" Steel or Thomas why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. The current crop of leaders are so dull, so ill-defined, so lacking in personality that it's almost impossible for comedians to rage against them. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one 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. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. By raising the pay of their own staff to a minimum of the living wage, they have set an example which a growing number of large private-sector employers have followed. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. Arthur Scargill and the miners represented the only opposition to the prime minister and her destructive and divisive values and, after the strike, the way was open for the most aggressive neoliberal policies. 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!" 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. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". decision to resign. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. Out!" Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . We still live in the land Margaret built. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". 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 site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). There is a paradox. 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. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. 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%. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . Out! All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. 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 milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. In 2009, Boris Johnson lamented that Thatcher had become "a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor.". But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. 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. And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. Privatisation did not feature in the Conservative election campaign, while the tougher approach to trade union reform had only really become evident since the winter of discontent, and even then was a gradual process. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. Such items have an They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. Sent Bobby Sands to an Irish hero's grave without a blink. 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 . You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. opportunities. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. Hire a Writer. The machinery of modern political management polls, consulting, focus groups is deployed mainly to discover what will make aparty and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher's Britain. Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. 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. Hugo Young was a political columnist forthe Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. There are many reasons for this. Thatcher's use of rhetorical devices supports her eulogy because the concept of Reagan being more. But perhaps her greatest legacy was New Labour. 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. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. 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.". She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. For her own part, she was a social conservative and yet today's right for, say, gay couples to marry if they want to fits with one aspect of the Thatcherite vision of personal choice. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. ", 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. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave But the choice captures her perfectly. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. 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 remained in power till I was 15. 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. She was immensely brisk. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. 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. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising A distinction is often made between two traditions of British Conservative thought: the paternalist "one nation/middle way" tradition, and the more libertarian one that is associated with Margaret Thatcher. There was, for example, the time in the late 1970s when, as Opposition Leader, she almost succeeded in censoring the one half-decent joke in a key campaign speech. 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! Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . The 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. 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.". Thatcher came to personify those ready to push anyone aside to gain power in a man's world and strengthen that world with their ambition. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. "Yes and that was one of the many weird things about her," smirked Alexei Sayle. Council house sales and advertising campaigns that encouraged the public to buy shares in privatised companies were meant to broaden the appeal of capitalism. 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. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. Everyone knows that. While some remember her as a national saviour, others only see her ruthless demolition of flailing state-owned industries. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. As far as her supporters are concerned, this radical transformation worked.