margaret thatcher speech writer

An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk. She certainly was divisive, bisecting the country politically and geographically: hard-hit regions in the north of England, Wales and Scotland may be notably less civil in their farewells. Sharp definition, hard edges, no effort at fuzzy contours (David Cameron, take note). They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. 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. Now it was the turn of the words, and no one, of course, would, against all the odds, do them better than the lady who, 25 years before, once thought the sky was beyond her limit. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. But the left also needs to look beyond the turbulent events in Europe to appreciate the speed of global change and the complications this creates for welfare-laden economies: the dynamos and innovators are increasingly found in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than France, Germany and Spain. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per cent of cases. As leader she was initially hyper-cautious. She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful She made her maiden The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. She was among the first Western leaders to She, for one, never underestimated her friend from California, then a state of some 24 million. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. CD icon next to them in the second column of the results list. 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. to secure international action to repair the damaged ozone layer. 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. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. The time was 1973. The prime minister was intensely interested in the campaign, and asked many penetrating questions. She mesmerised us. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. This does lead to divisions. Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. Margaret Thatcher had planned to attack Labour's unwillingness to condemn picket-line violence in her 1984 conference speech but changed her mind when an IRA bomb hit The Grand Hotel in Brighton. Many are children of the Thatcher age. 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. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. 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. The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. ", As Matthew Parris evocatively put it in Monday's Times, "She rather liked men (preferring our company, perhaps, to that of women), [but] she thought us the weaker sex. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. She was a gentle and peaceable woman my mother, that is and said few hard words about anyone, but in certain parts of the United Kingdom, and among certain social classes, Mrs T was detested, and not just for what people thought were her policies but for her persona for what she was. decision to resign. At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity. What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. Take the larger view. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. 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. can do business together". her maiden She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. 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. She would not have been half the . The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one To Britons of my generation, she . John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. I don't see that. and The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. 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. I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. 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. 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. The speakers form a rollcall of the globe's most interesting thinkers: Amartya Sen, the Nobel-winning Indian economist; Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologist and another Nobel winner; and Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, who focused on land rights for the poor. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to The US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. she Chvez is gone, but the voters are likely to re-elect Chavismo on 14 April. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. 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. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. 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. 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. Scottish and by extension UK politics has been skewed ever since. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. Britain's relative decline came to an end, although that was more due to slowdowns in countries such as France and Germany than an acceleration in UK productivity growth. Nor, contrary to myth, did Thatcherism emerge fully formed in May 1979. Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. But she exploited her luck. 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. It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. 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. Underestimating Ronald Reagan was an error committed by many of his critics and opponents; Reagan never minded a bit, thinking that being underestimated yielded him a significant advantage. After leaving office, MT widened and deepened her criticism of the European 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. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. 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". 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. Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. . speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". One turns with gratitude to Alan Clark's diaries for a fine description of being summoned to No 10 and being subjected to just such an examination. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. The appointment was a 20-minute audience with the . All rights reserved. At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? The resignation was announced 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. For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. 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. The Iron Lady had a green thumband a surprisingly green philosophy. Britain's record on innovation and investment have been extremely poor, while the hollowing out of manufacturing left the economy over-dependent on the de-regulated City. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. And we won back three we lost at by-elections.

Federal Inmate Text Service, Catholic Prayers For Those Suffering From Addiction, Articles M