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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. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. or copyright prevents reproduction on the site. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them. 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. 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. One also can't forget what happened to the agency that made Thatcher worldfamous: the Conservative party, of which she seemed such an improbable leader. Faced down trade union leaders after her early years apprentice years, when Jim Callaghan's Britain was falling apart in which the commonest fear was that the little lady would not be able to deal with them across the table. In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. One might even credit Thatcher with a willingness to jettison the old rules and conventions that used to prevent individuals deciding their own destiny. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. The dominance of finance in the economy and the failure of bank regulation flowed from her belief that markets should always be left to themselves. The time was 1973. 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. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. her maiden The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. 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. She became harder than hard. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. The Lady forced the opposition party to accommodate itself to the new, Thatcherite settlement in which the market would rule unless stated otherwise. 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!" 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. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Following several small strokes she announced, in March 2002, that her career as a speechmaker had ended. Mikhail Gorbachev, for one, learned the hard way. There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. From 1987 to 1988, he was a senior policy writer and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.. O'Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio . Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. ROBIN HARRIS worked for the Conservative Party from 1978, and increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. can do business together". Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. That did the trick.). Margaret Flowers is a leading activist, doctor, teacher, and co-founder of PopularResistance.org, a website that aims to inform and inspire grassroots movements around the world. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. 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. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. 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. performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the 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. And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. It isn't sad for anyone else. Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. Oxford CD-ROM explains how the statements were assembled and edited Hats. I was on my own. On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. This was a historic step, and resulted in further reinforcing the US-UK alliance. It's interesting, though, that even when comedians try to be political, they can never really land a punch on David Cameron, Nick Clegg or George Osborne. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. The challenge for the left is to fashion new and genuinely progressive policies in an age of austerity, when more money is not the answer to any question. 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. An author and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan staked her claim to speechwriting fame as a primary writer for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.Her notable speeches include Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" address, given on the 40 th anniversary of D-Daythe day Allied troops invaded Normandy in World War IIas well as the former president's . Just look around. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, Of course, it's in politics that the shadow looms most clearly. He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. As a physician, she has been a vocal advocate for a single-payer healthcare system that would . The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. 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. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. 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. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. be a nation in retreat". If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. Maggie! He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. Later that year she introduced the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fin, which prevented viewers and listeners hearing my voice. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political TRIBUTES were paid last night to Sir Bernard Ingham, the longstanding press secretary to Margaret Thatcher and a columnist in The Yorkshire Post until just a few weeks ago. Words. We still live in the land Margaret built. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising 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. declared that she wanted our money back. 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. If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide itcannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history. 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. She remained in power till I was 15. Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. So what caused this great divide, with one side a fountain of fresh ideas and the other struggling for new inspiration? Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". first television interview the following day, euphoric When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied 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. Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. The last time I met her was after all this was over. The set text is still Thatcher's declaration quoted in The Audience that "There is no such thing as society". Given the global economic crisis, rampant corporate greed and growing inequality, this should be a time of great ferment, with endless policy proposals bubbling up to challenge the post-Thatcher consensus at a time of immense and unsettling change. 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.". 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. a new dominance from Brussels", the At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. 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. It knew what Thatcher wanted. Look at the cars on the road, none made by the old, nationally-owned British Leyland and only few by the British marques that once dominated but which went the way of much of British industry unable to survive the chill wind of "market forces", another phrase which filled the air back then. 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. Speaking personally, it was a personal privilege beyond measure to have witnessed and participate in the blossoming of the special ties that continued throughout her entire time in office. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. 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." This is a style whose absence is much missed. But these concrete achievements do not wholly explain why she still looms so large, large enough that not one but two current West End plays The Audience and Billy Elliot grant Thatcher a pivotal, if largely unsympathetic, role, whether seen or unseen. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. More than once the view was advanced that it was a pity the IRA had not succeeded in their ultimate objective when they bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton. The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. Hire a Writer. Tasteless." The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. 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 . When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. Yet by the autumn of 1981 they had made her so unpopular that bets were being taken at the October party conference that she would be "gone by Christmas". People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. In 1980, I made several fast round trips to London, Paris and Bonn, and, on each occasion, had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Thatcher. That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. . At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: 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. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. Whathappened at the hands of this woman's indifference to sentiment andgood sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who losttheir jobs. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. A strong pound crippled exports and emptied factories. Thank you, too, Margaret. All rights reserved. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. It never was. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete The evidence shows that greater equality provides the foundation on which higher standards of social wellbeing can be built. This, too, we still live with. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. 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. Meryl Streep's depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. . Margaret Thatcher. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. Without it, she would have been nothing. Superlatives can be agreed: a remarkable first woman PM; the first winner of three elections in a row; brave; tough; relentless; clever; sleeplessly driven by a self-confident conviction that overawed her enemies. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. The resignation was announced The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. 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. 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. announced that White Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". Lady Thatcher, you honor us by coming to the site of Sir Winston's pivotal speech, an event Westminster College has immortalized with the beautiful Winston Churchill Memorial. 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 . We were wary of this. 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. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. Sue Gray used to be my boss. But growth rates in the decades since her period in office have been lower than during those that preceded her; nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth. Firstly, control of inflation rather than the pursuit of full employment was the centrepiece of macro economic strategy. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher's Britain. She gave it her best shot. The most important thing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did for British politics was to understand the significance of Thatcherism and to decide not to reverse it, indeed to carry it forward. It was thoroughly "wet". Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. In January 1983 she Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. The remainder are listed without a text because . Behind "omnishambles" headlines, her revolution is being pushed forward on new fronts in schools, health, planning, policing, probation and welfare. Heath took us into Europe, and a referendum in spring 1975 confirmed national approval for the move. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister.