I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. 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. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising 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. Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. 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." Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. Would we like her back? Yet a leader that a wide cross-section of Scots had come to despise. 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. In her eulogy for the former president, Thatcher uses specific structure, tone and diction, and word choices throughout her writing to . 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. April 25, 2020. Thatcher's title is Baroness. 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. On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. 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 US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. In the pantheon of this comedian's attacks on Thatcher, it was a retort that probably won't be treasured longer than the best lines from The Young Ones. In a twitter of panic, Labour shadow ministers sent out pleas yesterday: "Hoping all Labour supporters will respond with dignity and respect to news of Baroness Thatcher's death." 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. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. 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. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Gillian Anderson's Portrayl of Margaret Thatcher's Voice in 'The Crown I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. 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. But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. Margaret Thatcher - UN General Assembly Climate Change Speech (1989) 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. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Only today are we facing the cost. The impact that Hayek's writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. Margaret Thatcher: Private tears of Iron Lady's speech writer who no 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. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 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. You can get the Turnitin report from the writer on request along with the final deliverable. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. The tragic upshot has been the steep erosion of wages for the powerless bottom half, as income, wealth and property is sucked up to the top. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. Rhetorical Analysis Of Ronald Reagan's Speech | ipl.org 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. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. She worked to enhance its corporate power. Thatcher's unwavering belief in the invisible hand of the market meant that she did not believe it was part of her job description to put anything in its place. Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. 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 . 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. Promises. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. 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. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. She was 87. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. It isn't sad for anyone else. 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. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. 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. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. But now the history was what mattered. 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". Thatcher's passing is marked by street parties in Brixton, Belfast, Bristol, Derry, Glasgow and Liverpool, and seething bitterness among the mining families and communities she was allowed (including by scab union and Labour leaders) to destroy. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. Steely, certainly. "Being powerful is like being a lady. 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. 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. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. She preferred markets, and a strong but minimal central state that backed their rule. 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. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the "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. 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. she warned that she was not In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. . She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. 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. It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. Sue Gray has shown the dangers of thinking officials are more ethical Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of 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. As a physician, she has been a vocal advocate for a single-payer healthcare system that would . The author uses this idea of freedom in her writing to allow the audience to feel and understand the mission of Reagan--"to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism" (6-7). Margaret Thatcher Eulogy Rhetorical Analysis - Peachy Essay It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him a third of the country, according to some polls a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. As the coalition sets about shrinking the welfare state, it's still embarked on Thatcher's project of rolling back the frontiers of the state, dismantling the settlement that held from 1945 until it unravelled in the 1970s. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya, spoke Out!" 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. The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. Climate, freedom and denial: What "Green Thatcherism" teaches us today A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. As leader she was initially hyper-cautious. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. and She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. It destroyed the public's power to determine via parliament the services and prices of gas, electricity, telephone. For her own part, she was a social conservative and yet today's right for, say, gay couples to marry if they want to fits with one aspect of the Thatcherite vision of personal choice. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the 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. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. "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. One thinks now of the closing words of her splendid 2004 eulogy of Ronald Reagan, and how those words so perfectly speak a tribute to her life and works: "We here still move in twilight. Today we have four coalmines and around 2,000 miners. Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. Speeches, interviews & other statements - Margaret Thatcher 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. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. I don't see that. 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. If You Want Anything Said Ask a Man, Want Anything Done Ask a Woman My dad, I suspect, did. "The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. 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. Thatcher exposed the sharp edges of class division in Britain and the strike of 1984/5 was as much a clash of values as it was about pit closures. It came very hard, getting the words and paragraphs in the right order, a task for which, she eventually admitted, she had hired some help. We liked disliking her. 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 Thatcher's Speech to Congress - Hillsdale College Privatisation did not feature in the Conservative election campaign, while the tougher approach to trade union reform had only really become evident since the winter of discontent, and even then was a gradual process. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? There is now, however, an opportunity to commit to a new politics that learns lessons from her ambition yet undoes the damage and focuses on reconstruction. We were wary of this. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest. But it was the killing of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989 that reveals the depth of the Thatcher government's state collusion policy. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. A massive programme of social housing would be a good place to start, stimulating the economy. The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. 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. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. at The Hague in May 1992. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke "Maggie! I just now watched the British Gas one again. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. 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!" For the most part, it has not been undone. I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. 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. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. We have his example. Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. 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. To project the ideas of strength and . Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. Leaving aside the detail that the word "feminist" came into existence in 1895, comfortably in Chanel's lifetime, the woman who valued femininity above all other qualities in a woman and was heavily involved with the Nazis, including a wartime relationship with German officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, could not, in any circumstances, be described as a feminist. Certainly, in 1983, it did not occur to me to criticise Harold Macmillan or Alec Douglas-Home on the doorstep as a sure-fire vote turner. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and The credit boom both here and in the USA may have gone against her Grantham roots but was an equally inevitable result of deregulation and the temptation of easy loans for people hungry to improve living standards. When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." 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. All Rights Reserved. This was most evident in the shooting dead of three unarmed IRA activists in Gibraltar in March 1988. Firstly, control of inflation rather than the pursuit of full employment was the centrepiece of macro economic strategy. 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. Lady Thatcher's New Threats for Old - National Churchill Museum
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