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 and Reagan went on to facilitate a colossal transfer of wealth from poor to rich, leading to the world economic crash we now witness. What is really left by Thatcher to history? 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. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually. Margaret Thatcher's Climate Change Of Heart | HuffPost Impact Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. 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. The Thatcher Papers - Churchill Archives Centre Her bouffant and handbag and nasal voice were comedy gold, but she was also earnest, principled and said exactly what she meant. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. speech in the House of Commons, her 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. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. She became harder than hard. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. During the speech, . 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. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. 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. By John Cassidy. Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. To the victors we saycongratulations. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . But she became a very effective one. 'I was there': Margaret Thatcher 'not for turning', 1980 We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. 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. Promises. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. These talks, sometimes joined by the prime minister and run by his aide Rohan Silva, show the restless search for new ideas that still grips the right, one of the least recognised legacies of Margaret Thatcher. The result . A strong, so strong, leader. Sharp definition, hard edges, no effort at fuzzy contours (David Cameron, take note). To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. 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 . 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. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. It never was. recommended by Simon Heffer. And the miners. Margaret Thatcher - Quotes, Death & Life - Biography series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. 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. On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. declared that she wanted our money back, invited the She was, of course, the first and so far only female British prime minister, Jon Snow reiterated on Monday night, insinuating that this achievement should in general be celebrated, never mind the specifics of her leadership. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. A week later she spoke Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Margaret Thatcher might seem to some like an unlikely pioneer of the need for climate action but, in the late 1980s, she made a series of remarkable speeches and interventions on the subject and . Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. rejecting Commission proposals at the Rome European Council with the words First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. One turns with gratitude to Alan Clark's diaries for a fine description of being summoned to No 10 and being subjected to just such an examination. Thatcher's Bruges speech 'not anti-EU' - former aide - BBC News The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. 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. Maybe my memory is fanciful. This is the area where we need to make progress not just in restoring strong local government, but in understanding that democracy means more than a Westminster vote. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. Keith Joseph was her guru. She was 87. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. 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. April 8, 2013. Scotsman Obituaries: Sir Bernard Ingham, formidable press secretary to Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time, gave a eulogy to the grieving American people in honor of the late Ronald Reagan on June 11th, 2004. It was seen for what it was, nothing to do with economics, but purely an attempt to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers by wiping out the entire industry. Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress - Hillsdale College 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. This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. In the current wall-to-wall media welter, I caught the current leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davison MSP, being asked if Thatcher was an electoral asset for her. She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. first television interview the following day. She would not have been half the . For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. It was meant as a term of condemnation, a concise way of arguing that riots in the street or the devastation of a pit village were the inevitable features of this new land that had arisen in the 1980s, a country reshaped by the woman at the top. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) 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. Seizing her chariot's reins to drive it on recklessly, they lack her brains, experience and political skill. But she exploited her luck. 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. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. She was catapulted into the Conservative leadership by a small group of ideologues centred around a thinktank, determined to roll back the statist ideas that dominated Britain after the postwar Attlee government. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. There are many reasons for this. 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. But Thatcher was still cautious. her maiden Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." making her big speech the following day as scheduled. I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher. A Study of the Emotional Eulogy of Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. departing Downing Street on 28 November. 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. Many hated her. 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. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. 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. the British Embassy in Paris and stated I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here. Margaret Thatcher's Eulogy for Ronald Reagan- Rhetorical Analysis Essay She remained in power till I was 15. Hats. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. 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. 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. "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. 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. 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.". 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. Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status.