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 . Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. 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. But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. But Labour is no less in thrall. But look at this typical difference between her and her imitators: where Cameron has charged into Europe, taking his party out of the influential European People's party of natural allies, making enemies and building no useful coalitions, it was she who signed the Single European Act, understanding its importance for British trade, careful to make allies as well as swinging her handbag. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration There are more than 8,000. The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. Britain's relative decline came to an end, although that was more due to slowdowns in countries such as France and Germany than an acceleration in UK productivity growth. Alamat kami. We might now be taking stock, post credit crunch, of our losses and gains since the 1986 deregulation of the City, but it is doubtful that we will ever undo her legacy. Simon Heffer, journalist, historian and friend of Margaret Thatcher, recommends the best books to read to gain an understanding of the United Kingdom's first female prime ministerand explains why she was the most influential British leader of the modern era. . To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM, 1945-90, edited Christopher delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. This was the feminine creature who, two years later, was leader of the Conservative party. The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. 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. 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. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. At Cheltenham the following month she 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. 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. ", 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. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. The Tories triumphed, of course, and lost only two sitting MPs Hamish Gray and the social-security scrounger-bashing Iain Sproat, who vacated his marginal Aberdeen seat and headed for the Scottish Borders, only to suffer defeat there at the hands of the Alliance. I just now watched the British Gas one again. 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. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. On the same edition of Channel 4 News, Louise Mensch named only three successful female politicians as part of her defence ofThatcher and only one of those was a Conservative. Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. And the single mums. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. By 1990 it was transformed. This speech was delivered soon after her taking office in 1979. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. Getting the record straight. 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. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". During the speech, . That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. be a nation in retreat". Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. opportunities. They're not Thatcher. Contrary to an increasingly common belief, "a woman who is successful" is not synonymous with "a feminist". Few would argue that they have not endured. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. to his resignation letter on 1 November, defended herself against rough In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. We have his example. But she also provided great material. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. There are many reasons for this. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom's first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. . "Comes here every week to water them flowers." Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". June 5, 1992 - Is named a life peer on the Queen's honor list. first television interview the following day, euphoric She was immensely brisk. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. recommended by Simon Heffer. Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. "Maggie! A growing body of research now shows that the quality of social relations is among the most powerful influences on the happiness, health and wellbeing of populations in the rich countries. Maggie! But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. She made her maiden There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. 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. 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 . While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. Nobody, at least that I know of, objected to that observation on the ground that it was disrespectful to the ability of the Chavez family to mourn in peace. It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant. The 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. Plus there's the fact that comedy is now a big business, and there's less money in sharp satire than gentle observation. I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. in his defence during the IranContra affair later that year.. Elected for a third term in June 1987, she told But as weand others (including Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers) have shown, wider income differences reduce social mobility and make it harder for people with poorer backgrounds to do so. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, There had been Churchill and his defiance; there had been Kipling and his If; there had been her father in his grocer's shop in Grantham. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. We Americans will not see you again in our time, but we will never forget you. While some remember her as a national saviour, others only see her ruthless demolition of flailing state-owned industries. In a eulogy by the former prime minister of Great Britain, Margret Thatcher honors the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the late president. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Margaret Thatcher's 1980 speech was written by playwright Ronnie Miller, and Julia recalls that the night before delivering the speech she had a huge row with him about the content. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . 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. 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. Scotland was her mission impossible. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. Thatcher's title is Baroness. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. After all, the right began to refocus only after Tony Blair's second landslide, when people began to recognise they would not drift back into power. This was her last important public statement. 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. It destroyed the public's power to determine via parliament the services and prices of gas, electricity, telephone. Margaret Thatcher (October 13, 1925 - April 8, 2013) was the first woman prime minister of the United Kingdom and the first European woman to serve as a prime minister. There is a paradox. 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. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. Instead state assets and a huge income stream from North sea oil were used to fund a populist programme of tax cuts, privatisation and council housesales. 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. The welfare state set out to ensure that no one, in the UK at least, would starve or freeze to death, or suffer or die for lack of medical or other care. It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. In fact, several countries have adopted these ideas with startlingly successful results; just changing the wording on some forms raised an extra 200m income tax in Britain, while personalised text messages drastically reduced the use of bailiffs to recover court fines. Interview by Benedict King. She went to a fee-paying school and to Oxford at her father's expense, gliding easily into the upper echelons of student politics. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. In short, miners believed in society. . Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. . One leading Tory thinker said current academic concepts such as evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics were fundamentally rightwing; another said disruptive digital technology liberated individuals against powerful behemoths which may be true, but some of the most striking online advances harness the collective spirit. She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the 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. If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. 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 . Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. 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. He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies. But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society. In 1990 Thatcher authorised the then British secretary of state Peter Brooke to reopen back-channel negotiations with republicans. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. for the disk. One of the few direct hits scored in the modern era was when Alex Ross and James Herring remixed Nick Clegg's bizarre "I'm sorry" speech and turned it into a hilarious R&B tune. Norman and Margaret hold, and will always hold, a unique place in our esteem and affection. 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. Here is a selection of the best writing from commentators, politicians and journalists on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in power - and on her continuing impact in the time following her downfall, as figures from across the political spectrum examine the legacy of one of the most important political figures from the last half-century, this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama, key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War, publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq, the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez, the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper, Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers, nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth, decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality, intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy, Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s, "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". 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. What is really left by Thatcher to history? He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture . 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 preface to the These developments set a benchmark. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . 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. 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. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. 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.