margaret thatcher speech writer margaret thatcher speech writer

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. The gender remained, its artefacts deployed with calculation. We were not unique in such a response but she failed to appreciate that Scots are balanced, canny folk insofar as we have a well-developed chip on each shoulder. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. All rights reserved. From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. When I think of this memorial, I think of the words of Rupert Brooke, "that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.". It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. and 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. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. 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. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. It made minor savings at best and was, as the . Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. Handbag. Margaret Thatcher's government defended structured political and religious discrimination and political vetting in the north, legislated for political censorship and institutionalised, to a greater extent than ever before, collusion between British state forces and unionist death squads. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. ", 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. The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . Or maybe audiences just really, really hated her and wanted to blow off some steam. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". Hire writer now Order. Oxford CD-ROM explains how the statements were assembled and edited for the disk. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. "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 1978 meeting was their last in person until Mrs Thatcher became Reagan's first state visitor, 26-28 February 1981. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. In her 1982 party conference speech, Margaret Thatcher offered a prediction for the future: "How absurd it will seem in a few years' time that the state ran Pickfords removals and Gleneagles Hotel . It's telling that Tony Blair's domestic legacy amounts to two responses to Thatcherism: forcing Labour to accept it and then compensating for the damage the Tories had wreaked through sustained underinvestment in the public realm. They are acolytes of a raw Thatcher cult they have rough-hewn and exaggerated in their own image. By John Cassidy. And the single mums. They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. 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 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. Thatcher jokes were big business, from Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, to Harry Enfield's satire of Thatcher's children with his Loadsamoney character. 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. She was 87. 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. After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. November). After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. In her thoughtful and prescient remarks, the Prime Minister reached back into history to recall how far the English-Speaking Peoples had come since victory in . She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. 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. 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. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. speaking in March 2002.). She forced us to decide what was truly important. MT prayed on the Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference It was not interested in a resolution. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Interview by Benedict King. And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.". Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders. departing Downing Street on 28 November. But the choice captures her perfectly. first television interview the following day. 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. There was, for example, the time in the late 1970s when, as Opposition Leader, she almost succeeded in censoring the one half-decent joke in a key campaign speech. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. She invited the 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. morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. A meeting in Downing Street had left the Pakistan leader besotted with the older woman's wisdom and generosity: '"I tell you, she's such a kind person.". A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. 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. 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 . In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. 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 . 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. Reagan was received coolly, and the discussion was highly superficial, if only because the British side clearly did not care to engage on substance: meet for a serious discussion with a movie actor and a "Grade B" actor at that? "Comes here every week to water them flowers." But now the history was what mattered. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. 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. 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. 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. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. 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. 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. We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya, spoke I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. Thanks to the comparison with Cameron, we are reminded that the Thatcher reign was more circumspect and well-managed than it seemed at the time. The word "free" is used to help the audience 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. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. She was among the first Western leaders to In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". 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. "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. Gloves. The woman dubbed as the Iron Lady during her premiership made her last tearful speech as the leader of the country from the doorstep of . This is what we mean by the Thatcher revolution, imposing on Britain, for better or for worse, some of the liberalisation that the major continental economies know,20 years later, they still need. I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Hats. I was on my own. Rishi Sunak 20 July 2022 9:30pm. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". She defended Ronald Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). This was most evident in the shooting dead of three unarmed IRA activists in Gibraltar in March 1988. 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. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. In January 1983 she 1971 was the year of Ted Heath's Conservative government, which was trying to make huge savings to the budget. This was the feminine creature who, two years later, was leader of the Conservative party. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. A couple of days later on the 11th, Margaret Thatcher the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote an eulogy for Ronald Reagan. At her first conference speech, she chastised the Labour Party on economic . Had pollsters and the 24/7 media forced leaders to follow opinion, not lead it? Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. 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. She fervently believed the market would soon repair their loss. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . She was immensely brisk. she warned that she was not In January 1976, Thatcher delivered a speech at Kensington Town Hall in London, and spoke about the Iron Curtain the political boundary that separated Europe during World War II. 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. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. Much has been written about the special significance and warmth of the British-American alliance during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. 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." In 11 years, Thatcher promoted only one woman to her cabinet, preferring instead to elevate men whom Spitting Image memorably and, in certain instances, accurately, described as "vegetables".