From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness? A friend of South African apartheid and mass murderers from Kissinger and Pinochet to the Khmer Rouge after they had killed two million Cambodians she was a zealous saleswoman for the arms industry. Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. But really, such statements were anything but, first because sweeping statements about genders are the opposite of gender equality and second because they revealed her real attitude towards women, which lay behind her notable lack of female-friendly policies, her utter lack of interest in childcare provision or positive action. 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. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. 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. In 1968 she gave a lecture asking What's In a world where most media talking heads come from the top few percent of income earners, unions are not only important in wage bargaining, they also provide some of the few well-informed voices whose job it is to speak on behalf of the less well-paid. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society" and is After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle 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. 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. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". MT gave her first Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. There are still some great comics doing political material, with Mark Steel and Mark Thomas flying the flag of alternative comedy, while people such as Josie Long and Chris Coltrane find the funny in activism. 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. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen. 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. Rhetorical Analysis Of Ronald Reagan's Speech | ipl.org They built and provided their own welfare facilities and, well before today's welfare state was built, miners created their own welfare systems to alleviate hardship. It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . To demand that all of that be ignored in the face of one-sided requiems to her nobility and greatness is a bit bullying and tyrannical, not to mention warped. We were not unique in such a response but she failed to appreciate that Scots are balanced, canny folk insofar as we have a well-developed chip on each shoulder. her maiden In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. Sharp definition, hard edges, no effort at fuzzy contours (David Cameron, take note). Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. The result . 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she The core of this site is a massive database of MT's public statements of all kinds across the years (speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc), searchable by date, subject, importance, and keyword. "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. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. Demonising unions and stripping the great mass of private-sector workers of a voice and power in the workplace is still the root of the great living standards crisis that saw the share of wealth going to wages slide long before Lehman Brothers failed. Too timid, too in thrall, the 13-year Labour government rarely dared challenge the attitudes she planted in the national psyche. Endeavouring to persuade the British into an attitude of hostility to the group with which she spent 11 years deepening their connection must take a high place in any catalogue of anti-statesmanship. 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. John O'Sullivan (columnist) - Wikipedia Ultimately, despite the despondent times of the Cold War and the waning confidence of the citizens, Margaret Thatcher delivered her eulogy speech in belief of President Ronald Reagan and used the rhetorical appeals of pathos, imagery, metaphor, and ethos to accomplish his presidency as successful. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. At its best, that has meant a mood of freedom and choice that has made these islands a brighter, less drab place than they once were. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. 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. This is what we mean by the Thatcher revolution, imposing on Britain, for better or for worse, some of the liberalisation that the major continental economies know,20 years later, they still need. A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. three press interviews (15-17 November) when Howe's resignation speech There are more than 8,000. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. The items stored in this section of the site are texts, but many of the most important statements are also available in audio or video form in the separate Multimedia section. Thatcher's threat to butcher the mining industry, destroy the fabric of mining communities and in particular the trade union to which miners had a bond of loyalty, was met with the fiercest resistance any government has met in peacetime. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. Chvez is gone, but the voters are likely to re-elect Chavismo on 14 April. But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. It was not interested in a resolution. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. Prime Minister Thatcher inherited a settled state of British Europeanness, in which Brussels and the [European] Community began to influence, and often determine, the British way of doing things. And he would credit the contribution of Helmut Kohl, who rose to power in Germany in part because of the influence of Thatcher and Reagan. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot (20 Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. 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.". This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. Margaret Thatcher's environmental record: She was a climate hawk. for the disk. Take the larger view. ", 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. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. There are more than 8,000. Bruges speech - Wikipedia After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Throw the Lib Dems into the mix and it becomes highly combustible. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration Arguably, it was not the sale of council houses that was the problem, but the failure to replace the stock and maintain a sufficient supply of affordable homes. 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. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. Reagan was a highly influential president during his time in office, and had a lot of responsibility concerning the Cold War. The task of representing the White House usually was the role of the vice-president, but in this special case, the Reagans and the Bushes both attended. But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive. March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' When the mourners gather for Baroness Thatcher's funeral tomorrow, one important figure from her political past will be . Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought toannihilate. Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. Tributes paid as Sir Bernard Ingham dies, aged 90 - PressReader The economic crisis that Britain faced had been created not by the working class itself, these wholesome people that Sir Keith remembered from his vac weeks in Barnsley, but by a working-class leadership that was determined to bring the whole system crashing down. Scotsman Obituaries: Sir Bernard Ingham, formidable press secretary to Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Had Jim Callaghan won the 1979 election, he too would have faced the challenge of how to modernise an economy beset by high inflation, weak management and poor industrial relations. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. She became harder than hard. Nelson travelled to South Africa where he helped negotiate a deal that saw the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance acquire AK-47 automatic rifles, pistols, grenades, and RPG rocket launchers in late 1987 or early 1988. Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By 1987, anti-Tory tactical voting had taken hold. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. . At a party leaders' meeting in Washington, DC in 1985, Prime Minister Thatcher spent all day in the House of Commons, then boarded Concorde and flew to Washington to participate until late into the evening; she took such policy co-operation very seriously. The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. declared that she wanted our money back. 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. 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. first television interview the following day, euphoric Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. National Press Club Luncheon Speakers: Margaret Thatcher (Recorded . I don't see that. She forced us to decide what was truly important. They are a more energetic and impressive group than their predecessors, often with experience outside politics that makes them impatient and independent-minded. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. Analysis Of Ronald Reagan's Eulogy By Margaret Thatcher "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . My dad, I suspect, did. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. led Michael Heseltine to run against her for the party leadership. Across Yorkshire or south Wales, Kent or Nottinghamshire, there are villages that have never recovered from the closure of coal mines, ordered by a Thatcher who ruled there was no place for pits that were not "economically viable", regardless of the social consequences. April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. 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. Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word. But the left also needs to look beyond the turbulent events in Europe to appreciate the speed of global change and the complications this creates for welfare-laden economies: the dynamos and innovators are increasingly found in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than France, Germany and Spain. 'The Crown' Season 4: Did Margaret Thatcher Really Sound - Decider If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. Margaret Thatcher Eulogy Rhetorical Analysis - Peachy Essay The resignation was announced John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "We have not Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and British Conservatism's Politics That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. She was immensely brisk. 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. "Being powerful is like being a lady. A couple of days later on the 11th, Margaret Thatcher the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote an eulogy for Ronald Reagan. Margaret Thatcher is being remembered as the prime minister who remade Britain's economy, the "Iron Lady" who stood up to communism and who fought and won a war in the distant South Atlantic . Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. . They're not Thatcher. 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. Gloves. The dockers. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. 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. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. On one visit, our campaign chairman, William J Casey, later director of the CIA, came along, and we had a fruitful meeting at 10 Downing Street.
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