margaret thatcher speech writer

It never was. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. 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.". She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. Each now seems banal. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought toannihilate. 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. The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. Accounts vary. He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies. In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. Margaret Thatcher, Signed Speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate 1,500-2,000 . Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. So the woman I met in Curzon Street, dimpling elegantly, can now be seen in history with an unexpected achievement to her credit. 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. Few would argue that they have not endured. While some remember her as a national saviour, others only see her ruthless demolition of flailing state-owned industries. Heath took us into Europe, and a referendum in spring 1975 confirmed national approval for the move. By John Cassidy. But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." Today's Tories walk in Thatcher's footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy. Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. 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? She usually knew the limits to public tolerance, gauging how much of the spirit of '45 abided, so even if it was between gritted teeth, she forced herself to say, "The NHS is safe in our hands": she reorganised but did not privatise it. You can get the Turnitin report from the writer on request along with the final deliverable. She forced us to decide what was truly important. 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. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. 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. with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. with the European Community when she At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. her maiden At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. At a party leaders' meeting in Washington, DC in 1985, Prime Minister Thatcher spent all day in the House of Commons, then boarded Concorde and flew to Washington to participate until late into the evening; she took such policy co-operation very seriously. The challenge for the left is to fashion new and genuinely progressive policies in an age of austerity, when more money is not the answer to any question. Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Action. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. Here is a selection of the best writing from commentators, politicians and journalists on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in power - and on her continuing impact in the time following her downfall, as figures from across the political spectrum examine the legacy of one of the most important political figures from the last half-century, this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama, key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War, publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq, the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez, the Daily Mail has morefemale bylines than any other UK paper, Alan Krueger, chair of Obama's council of economic advisers, nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth, decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality, intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy, Rik Mayall's student rants in The Young Ones, wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s, "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". defended Ronald But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive. But keeping the show on the road is what all of them must first attend to, because there's nobody else to do it. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. 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. 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. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. The task of representing the White House usually was the role of the vice-president, but in this special case, the Reagans and the Bushes both attended. That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. Rhetorical Analysis Of Margaret Thatcher's Speech 722 Words | 3 Pages . Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite 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. Margaret Thatcher's landmark Bruges speech about the future of Europe was never intended to push the UK towards the exit, the man who wrote it says. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. As a physician, she has been a vocal advocate for a single-payer healthcare system that would . Where she privatised state-owned industries, they go much further, seeking to dismantle the state itself. Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. Hewrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died. Modern comedians complain that they don't have personalities, they don't really stand for anything. This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). 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. A strong, so strong, leader. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. wrong with politics? I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I am reminded of this every time the debate comes up about whether more female bylines would reduce sexism in the media. 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. camps were revealed in August 1992. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during Reagan's presidency, and was close with him which Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM, 1945-90, edited Christopher "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. 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. Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. She added layers of her own to this intimacy, directing the creation of a single European market that surrendered important national powers to the collective. 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. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. Out! But, as the prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard says: "For things to remain the same, everything must change.". Buy the CD-ROM from this link or find one Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a For the most part, it has not been undone. There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. 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. 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. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. Without the Falklands/Malvinas war, which exploited nationalism (as Argentinian dictator Galtieri did) and which Labour would not oppose, she would never have been re-elected in 1983. 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. I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" Steel or Thomas why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. True, Labour, James Callaghan and the unions played their part by blocking Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife attempt to create German or Nordic co-operation between unions and industry that might have rescued unions from Thatcher's crushing. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. 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." It was thoroughly "wet". 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. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. TRIBUTES were paid last night to Sir Bernard Ingham, the longstanding press secretary to Margaret Thatcher and a columnist in The Yorkshire Post until just a few weeks ago. By the close of her premiership, he was probably the most trusted member of her political team at Downing Street, and he left Number Ten with her. decision to resign. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Perhaps she had just come inside. That was the daunting task Margaret Thatcher set herself when she arrived in Downing Street in May 1979 at the end of a traumatic decade that had seen a three-day week, inflation topping 25%, a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the winter of discontent. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the September 25, 2020. Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. But Thatcher was still cautious. To project the ideas of strength and . The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. in his defence during the IranContra affair later that year.. Elected for a third term in June 1987, she told During the speech, . recommended by Simon Heffer. She preferred markets, and a strong but minimal central state that backed their rule. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. 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. 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. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. All rights reserved. Emery Evans . 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. Chavez was indeed a divisive and controversial figure, and it would have been reckless to conceal that fact out of some misplaced deference to the grief of his family and supporters. Scotland was her mission impossible. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. These developments set a benchmark. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. 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 young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. 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. Indeed, many of the policy innovations associated with Thatcher had already been pioneered by her predecessor. 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. 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. She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". Gaze at the telephone. MT won election as Conservative leader on 11 February 1975 and gave a euphoric Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. Hire a Writer. Take the larger view. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . 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. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world. as far as can be known. 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. In January 1983 she 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. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. A decade later they were wiped out in terms of Scotland-based Westminster constituency representation. Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of a It is not true that Thatcher didn't care about the media. Many are children of the Thatcher age. Dignity and decorum ruled the day - except in the poisoned anonymity of the internet. 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. Her Irish policy failed miserably. deeply felt eulogy, filmed in advance and relayed by video link to screens in the National Cathedral in Washington. Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. Such items have an There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. 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. A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. Hugo Young was a political columnist forthe Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. We have his example. It led to riots that nobody needed. 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. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: Bob Slayer, one of the genuine alternative comedians on the scene, likes to note the irony of what's become of comedy. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. ", 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. All rights reserved. November). see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. When she walked into Downing Street promising harmony instead of discord, only one in seven children was poor and Britain was more equal than at any time in modern history. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. She became deaf to all warning. performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the making her big speech the following day as scheduled. To her detractors, Thatcher is the prime minister who wiped out more than 15% of Britain's industrial base with her dogmatic monetarism, squandered the once-in-a-lifetime windfall of North Sea oil on unemployment pay and tax cuts, and made the UK the unbalanced, unequal country it is today. "Maggie! But Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate, and the long, substantive lunch seemed to energize both future world leaders. 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. After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. She also put forward the idea of "a vast . Firstly, control of inflation rather than the pursuit of full employment was the centrepiece of macro economic strategy. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . 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. Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. 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 . . 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. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke 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. 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. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. If you have a . It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. led Michael Heseltine to run against her for the party leadership. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. This does lead to divisions. Not all writers were against her. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference 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."

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