margaret thatcher speech writer

The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. 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. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. Interview by Benedict King. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. And that made it easy to mock her. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. 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. Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn. They are acolytes of a raw Thatcher cult they have rough-hewn and exaggerated in their own image. The US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. For the most part, there's no material there. She describes Reagan as her friend and continues to narrate his good acts in America during his presidency. Yet, as the heated benefits debate showed last week, Labour is trapped by history bereft of fresh ideas and, when tentatively offering proposals, strangled by the most stifling conservatism. But the sense of community evaporated. The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political But she also provided great material. Emery Evans . It was all very well for me to write books. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. Hewrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. the British Embassy in Paris and stated Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. But she became a very effective one. 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. 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. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. "We have not When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. 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. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. To project the ideas of strength and . In his usual slightly dishevelled style, he went to Downing Street to discuss his pioneering concepts of behavioural economics and attempts to implement them under Barack Obama. To the victors we saycongratulations. Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. and for turning. "Yes and that was one of the many weird things about her," smirked Alexei Sayle. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. 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. . "Maggie! I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. The last remnants of the postwar consensus were swept away in the ensuing decade a period that saw the crushing of the trade unions, the Big Bang in the City, council house sales, the privatisation of large chunks of industry, the encouragement of inward investment, tax cuts, attempts to roll back the state, a deep manufacturing recession, a boom in North Sea oil production, and support for the creation of a single market in Europe. 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. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . So we agreed to reactivate the back channel. She was able to reach Miners had always known that eventually any of the colleries would close and were always prepared to accept that as a fact of life and find employment somewhere else within the industry, but Thatcher's attack was wholesale. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. first television interview the following day, euphoric Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. 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. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. At every level of his killing, British agents and agencies had a hand: the leader of the UDA group that carried out the killing was a Special Branch agent, as was the man who confessed to being the gunman, and the man who supplied the gun. The current crop of leaders are so dull, so ill-defined, so lacking in personality that it's almost impossible for comedians to rage against them. 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. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. 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. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. And the single mums. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. 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. 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. She was not a writer. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." 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. The Bruges speech was given by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the College of Europe at the Belfry of Bruges, Belgium, on 20 September 1988.Thatcher was opposed to any moves to transition the European Economic Community (EEC) into a federal Europe that would take powers away from its members. Maybe my memory is fanciful. Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM, 1945-90, edited Christopher Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . Reagan would often hasten to remind those paying tribute to his cold war strategy that it was, in the strictest sense of the term, a team effort. Of course, it's in politics that the shadow looms most clearly. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. Sayle recorded the song Get Me Mrs Thatcher, but says that in general he felt Thatcher jokes were a bit too easy, although he still shudders at the memory of a "wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s". Mrs T shared the same reductionism. And in 1983, for the first time, children born in Britain to non-British parents were denied automatic citizenship, fostering further racism and discrimination in immigration policy. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. Full employment had been ditched in 1976, while Labour had introduced monetary targets and cash limits for Whitehall departments while Denis Healey was at the Treasury. (Interestingly, Currie also recalled that when she approached Thatcher in 1988 to get approval for the world's first national breast-screening programme, she tried to appeal to the PM initially "as a woman" but that swiftly proved unsuccessful. 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. Get over her! "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just another one bites the dust " This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. All rights reserved. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated After being carried through the streets of London in a flag-draped coffin aboard a gun carriage, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was laid to rest this . Everyone knows where they were when they heard. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. . Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. 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. "Labour is stuck because they do not want to carry on the slimming down of the state and devolution of power but nor do they really want to reverse it," said one central Tory figure. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. Maybe it was the sound of the estuary pronunciation robbing her of her aspirational airs, a prototype of the Bouquet/Bucket joke. A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. to secure international action to repair the damaged ozone layer. The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. They rallied around each other when times were hard. 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. Norman and Margaret hold, and will always hold, a unique place in our esteem and affection. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. It still does. Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. Contrary to an increasingly common belief, "a woman who is successful" is not synonymous with "a feminist". This is not the Highland way. speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she Alexei Sayle blames Twitter and the "multiplicity of voices" in the modern world. Indeed a person with achemistry that repelled almost all thesignificant males in Edward Heath's cabinet who could never become theparty leader. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, Without it, she would have been nothing. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. You can get the Turnitin report from the writer on request along with the final deliverable. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. Miners were a hardy race of people who faced constant danger in the cause of mining coal but underneath that they were caring, sensitive individuals with a commitment to the communities in which they lived. Yet despite the attempts of some columnists to claim otherwise, Thatcher can't really be seen as "a warrior in the sex war", let alone as "the ultimate women's libber". It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. Much of any leader's record is unremarkable dross, and Thatcher was no exception.

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