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. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Much of any leader's record is unremarkable dross, and Thatcher was no exception. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. 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 I don't see that. But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. The Crown's Version of Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Downfall Takes a Lot of Liberties with . This is not the Highland way. The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. Philip Larkin visited Downing Street where the prime minister quoted approvingly one of his lines to him "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives." It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. "You would see MPs who came into any politics after Ihad and who were no better than me being promoted over my head," said Currie this week. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. Hire writer now Order. 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. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. The relative wealth of the UK 1% had been falling steadily for 50 years when Thatcher took power in 1979; since then it has climbed steeply and is almost back to 1918 levels. 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. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. "We have not Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. When I started knocking on Highland doors in May 1983, two things struck me more than any other. Thatcher's unwavering belief in the invisible hand of the market meant that she did not believe it was part of her job description to put anything in its place. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, replied Take the larger view. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. In retrospect, in much dissenting commentary there was often a taint of unexamined sexism. be a nation in retreat". He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. opportunities. Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. 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. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. There are many reasons for this. Not the loss of imperial markets, not lazy management, not the education system, not the decline of the industrial ethic: bitter men standing on platforms and asking for a show of hands to down tools were solely to blame. 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. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. It is not true that Thatcher didn't care about the media. As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. As Danny Dorling says in his 2004 study of the rise in violence: "Those who perpetrated the social violence that was done to the lives of young men starting some 20 years ago [the mid-80s] are the prime suspects for most of the murders in Britain." . The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. To Britons of my generation, she . Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. All can agree that Margaret Thatcher changed the heart of British politics more than any politician since Clement Attlee. speech in the House of Commons, her Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We If you have a . As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." and 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. She made her remarks Tasteless." And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. She preferred markets, and a strong but minimal central state that backed their rule. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. 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. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. She was a radical conservative, known for dismantling nationalized industries and social services, weakening union power.She was also the first incumbent prime minister in the UK removed on a vote of their own party. 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 . For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. speaking in March 2002.). 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. 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 . A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. The cautious tactician was suppressed. Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. 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. I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time. Everything has its season. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. 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.". 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. That's because, 23 years after she was ejected from Downing Street by her own party in a move whose psychic wounds linger on, the country we live in remains Thatcher's Britain. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. outlook at the time. November). 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. Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. Second was the particular hostility towards Margaret Thatcher and her local ministerial spear-carrier, energy minister and incumbent MP of 13 years' standing, Hamish Gray. The left misleads us and maybe itself when it says that Thatcher's policies, extended by New Labour and then by the coalition, have failed. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I will know that we have finally broken from the kind of capitalism that she championed and which died in 2008 when we see workers elected on to company boards. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. Reagan was especially interested in Mrs Thatcher's domestic policy initiatives, and it was quickly established that the foreign policy views ran along parallel lines. It was not interested in a resolution. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. They are a more energetic and impressive group than their predecessors, often with experience outside politics that makes them impatient and independent-minded. The word "free" is used to help the audience 100% Success rate. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. camps were revealed in August 1992. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. For the most part, there's no material there. Only today are we facing the cost.
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