margaret thatcher speech writer

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. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. "You see," she announced in her self-satisfied way, "it just goes to show what people can do when they have to. But there were also cuts for basic-rate taxpayers: the 1988 budget, for example, cut the top rate of tax from 60% to 40% and the standard rate from 27% to 25%. A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. What will not be forgotten? Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. 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. Council house sales and advertising campaigns that encouraged the public to buy shares in privatised companies were meant to broaden the appeal of capitalism. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. 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. Action. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . . As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. Her onslaught on the trade unions left those movements pale imitations of their former selves, too weak to resist the drive to the "flexible labour market" which has seen Britain become the home of what one senior Labour figure calls "crappy jobs", with low pay and no protection. Thank you, too, Margaret. 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. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. 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. I don't see that. at The Hague in May 1992. 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. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. By 1990 it was transformed. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. Many hated her. 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. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she She mesmerised us. Instead, her Big Bang blew the roof off City profits and property booms filled the gap where productive industry should have sprouted. 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. verbatim and in context. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. 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. declared that she wanted our money back, invited the Hugo Young was a political columnist forthe Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. This is the area where we need to make progress not just in restoring strong local government, but in understanding that democracy means more than a Westminster vote. As the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher, I was given special permission by the Cabinet Secretary to see government papers not yet released to the public.For . The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. 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.". Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association. Would we like her back? Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. Was it cruelty? But now the history was what mattered. as far as can be known. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. The welfare state, with its unemployment and housing benefits and free healthcare, actually protected wages: employers could not force workers to accept low pay or unpaid overtime because of the job's healthcare provision, as they do in the US. Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers. 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." Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. Less noted . The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. This report of the Conservative party conference ran in the Guardian on Saturday October 11 1980, Edited and full versions of Margaret Thatcher's 'The lady's not for turning' speech, delivered at the Conservative party conference in Brighton on 10 October 1980, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every 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. She became harder than hard. The great contradiction in her politics was that someone who yearned for the certainties of small-town shopkeeper economics helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance that is still an ironic positive legacy of her time in power. Meanwhile, you struggle to identify deep thinkers in party ranks beyond a couple of veteran stalwarts; even the left's thinktanks appear moribund or merely harking back to an idealised past. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot (20 A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. She was right, he was wrong. In rich societies such as the UK, what makes most difference to the real quality of our lives is the quality of community life and social interaction. Everything has its season. At Cheltenham the following month she There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. Out! Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness? Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders. So look around this kingdom of ours, at a devolved Scotland contemplating independence a state of affairs that owes much to Thatcher's antagonistic relationship with that country. She worked to enhance its corporate power. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady". 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. 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. Each now seems banal. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. At her first conference speech, she chastised the Labour Party on economic . 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. Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. All Rights Reserved. The centralised statism that dominated politics for much of the 20th century, given its last pathetic gasp under the profligate government of Gordon Brown, ultimately failed the poor while proving financially unsustainable and unsuited to modern times. one Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. I just now watched the British Gas one again. "They did their thing with no chance of making any money, so they stood up in crappy pubs and said, 'I hate Maggie'. She was able to reach Perhaps this is unsurprising: four years ago Ed Miliband sneered at "nudge" economics as something "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. Any such objections would have been invalid. In the prime Thatcher years they required a severity of will to carry through that would now, if called on, bewrapped in so many cycles of deluding spin as to persuade us it hadn't really happened. 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. Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. Opponents and supporters of Margaret Thatcher will never agree about the value of her legacy, but as for her importance, her hypnotic hold on us, they are bound to find common ground. 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. Across Yorkshire or south Wales, Kent or Nottinghamshire, there are villages that have never recovered from the closure of coal mines, ordered by a Thatcher who ruled there was no place for pits that were not "economically viable", regardless of the social consequences. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. 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. So the woman I met in Curzon Street, dimpling elegantly, can now be seen in history with an unexpected achievement to her credit. Thatcher's reign helped to inspire alternative comedy by creating a generation so bereft of hope that they started putting on gigs just for the sake of something to do. I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here. However, for almost a decade Sinn Fin had been patently trying to build a peace process and unfolding events on the world stage including the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and the release of Mandela were evidence that governments, and apparently intractable situations, could change. 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. 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. While Labour was now "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", ambitious feminism wanted to be let in to the boardroom and every corridor of power that and little else is what they mean by changing the world. As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. Thatcher's title is Baroness. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. June 5, 1992 - Is named a life peer on the Queen's honor list. Gloves. 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. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. The government's welfare bill has been swollen by tax credits and housing benefit caused by the labour market reforms and council house sales of the 1980s. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. 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. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. 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. She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. History, Sample Essay. Until her final poll-tax hubris, she knew when swerving was the better part of valour and despite that famous one-liner, she was sometimes for turning. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. LONDON Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister and uncompromisingly conservative "Iron Lady" of the 1980s, has died. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. What is really left by Thatcher to history? In short, miners believed in society. Prime Minister Thatcher inherited a settled state of British Europeanness, in which Brussels and the [European] Community began to influence, and often determine, the British way of doing things. It was all very well for me to write books. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship it's just not British. This has been a terrible labour, she said. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. She made one Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. Margaret Thatcher Essay: Health Category. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. 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. Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. We were wary of this. In my view, nothing said prior to her passing or since has been inaccurate in the description of this very special, warm relationship, the likes of which we may never see again. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. Buy the CD-ROM from this link or find one There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. 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 . 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. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration Not all writers were against her. The core of this site is a massive database of MT's public statements of all kinds across the years (speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc), searchable by date, subject, importance, and keyword. Few would argue that they have not endured. 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." Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. The result . So it suggests the anachronistic and unaffordable return to a contributory welfare system, while opposing the further opening up of education and health provision; some even float the renationalisation of railways. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. She adopts an endearing and sentimental tone using ethos, repetition, and . Norman and Margaret hold, and will always hold, a unique place in our esteem and affection. But, as the prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard says: "For things to remain the same, everything must change.". Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. "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. In this eulogy, Thatcher uses rhetorical strategies to convince her readers into believing what she states. It led to riots that nobody needed. In November 1978, Hannaford and I organized a European fact-finding tour for Reagan, and the first stop was London. 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. All rights reserved. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. Out! Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. 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. Several strong women on the continent have risen to the top, but thisBritish woman, in Britain of all places, became a phenomenon, first, throughher gender. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . "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. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). Before the real Thatcher's election in 1979 she took lessons with a speech coach at the Royal National Theatre, hoping to make her voice more commanding and less "shrill" in broadcasts. It isn't sad for anyone else. Hewrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died. As working families in poverty now account for more than half of those below the poverty line, a government committed to "making work pay" should surely encourage this trend and raise the minimum wage. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot, she Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: "Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her.". And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . 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.". April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. 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. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. 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.". Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. 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. 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. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. The authors show just how much . Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". There are more than 8,000. They're not Thatcher. Her Irish policy failed miserably. Modern comedians complain that they don't have personalities, they don't really stand for anything. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. A strong, so strong, leader. Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. 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. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". 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. Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. her maiden Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. 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. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve.

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