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. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. . 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. But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. All rights reserved. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher's Britain. . In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. Nor, contrary to myth, did Thatcherism emerge fully formed in May 1979. When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a But the choice captures her perfectly. To project the ideas of strength and . 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. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. 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. The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. 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. Accounts vary. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle Everything has its season. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism. Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective. Steely, certainly. She forced us to decide what was truly important. 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. 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. A strong, so strong, leader. Thatcher's Spitting Image puppet was different from the others; while other characters, such as Ronald Reagan and the pope, were exaggerated into fantasy versions of themselves, the rubber Maggie was just like the one who appeared on the news a stern, cold, matronly figure who had a slightly oedipal relationship with her cabinet. Published: Sunday 21st February 2021. She was always the Spitting Image bully. But the sense of community evaporated. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. "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. 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. I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. The main names associated with Fatcha-bashing Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle deny that they relied so heavily on her for material. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. She was evicted from Downing Street with all the ruthlessness, treachery and warped humanity of what passes for high politics. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. 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 preface to the The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". 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. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. of times. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. . Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. It made minor savings at best and was, as the . So what caused this great divide, with one side a fountain of fresh ideas and the other struggling for new inspiration? 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". She was not a writer. Such items have an 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. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. 'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. can do business together". Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. The Tories triumphed, of course, and lost only two sitting MPs Hamish Gray and the social-security scrounger-bashing Iain Sproat, who vacated his marginal Aberdeen seat and headed for the Scottish Borders, only to suffer defeat there at the hands of the Alliance. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. cent of cases. Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. "Yes and that was one of the many weird things about her," smirked Alexei Sayle. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez: "To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.". 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. I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher. Though she recognised the dangers of global warming, Thatcher's industrial and economic policies prioritised economic growth. In truth, Thatcher is one of the clearest examples of the fact that a successful woman doesn't always mean a step forward for women. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. In a world where most media talking heads come from the top few percent of income earners, unions are not only important in wage bargaining, they also provide some of the few well-informed voices whose job it is to speak on behalf of the less well-paid. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. The dockers. I was just behind her at the civic museum in Dubrovnik when the local guide explained a model showing the elaborate system of ancient wells and tunnels that had provided the city with fresh water no matter how fierce the siege. 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 . A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . Mrs T shared the same reductionism. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" of British politics who died Monday at the age of 87, is being lionized as the woman who tilted British domestic and economic policy to the right. It was all very well for me to write books. Maybe it was the sound of the estuary pronunciation robbing her of her aspirational airs, a prototype of the Bouquet/Bucket joke. "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . The left misleads us and maybe itself when it says that Thatcher's policies, extended by New Labour and then by the coalition, have failed. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. During Margaret Thatcher's rise to the top, he was one of the backroom figures whose words helped create her reputation as the Iron Lady. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. 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. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. 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. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. 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. outlook at the time. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. Selling off the family silver Harold Macmillan and later Labour called it, as Margaret Thatcher set about reversing the 1945 nationalisations that had put oil, gas, coal, electricity and an airline as well as a house removal company in public hands. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. 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. She was among the first Western leaders to The spell of community. 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. June 30, 1992 - Swearing . On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. 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. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. While she spoke of his example as a beacon, she knew very well that she was an important component of what is often attributed solely to him, and in the first instance "winning" the cold war. Emery Evans . Yet by the autumn of 1981 they had made her so unpopular that bets were being taken at the October party conference that she would be "gone by Christmas". 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. Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. 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. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) She wrecked her own party, while promoting, via many a tortuous turn, Labour's resurrection. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. From the invention of the term "sado-monetarism" through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation's masochistic imagination. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. 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. ", This was the great leader in her favourite pose as Samuel Smiles: human beings didn't need to be helped they needed to help themselves. 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. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office. 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.". The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy. She considered European Commission president Jacques Delors a campaigner for . 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. 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. "What's going on there, mate?" Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. But growth rates in the decades since her period in office have been lower than during those that preceded her; nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth. 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. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . 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. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. 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. Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. Back when we called her Maggie, when it seemed she would have her wish and "go on and on" in ruling the country, her opponents would lament some new step towards social ruin with the withering, two-word verdict: "Thatcher's Britain.". Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". That did the trick.). We can't blame (or credit) her for all of this, of course. She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a 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. The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. which revealed a good deal as to her political These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. Many hated her. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? This, too, we still live with. 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. This was hardly the first or even the worst example of a dig at Thatcher tinged so needlessly with sexism. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. speech in the House of Commons, her An author and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan staked her claim to speechwriting fame as a primary writer for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.Her notable speeches include Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" address, given on the 40 th anniversary of D-Daythe day Allied troops invaded Normandy in World War IIas well as the former president's . Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . The Big Bang of City deregulation, the Tell Sid scramble for buying and selling shares, the sense that money is the highest value, wealth the greatest sign of worth all these were hallmarks of the Thatcher era in its mid-80s pomp.
