margaret thatcher speech writer

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. As leader she was initially hyper-cautious. "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. 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. 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.". Beleagured Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher makes pun during the 1981 Conservative Party conference speech: "the lady's not for turning" she says to her crit. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. She was a radical conservative, known for dismantling nationalized industries and social services, weakening union power.She was also the first incumbent prime minister in the UK removed on a vote of their own party. A friend of South African apartheid and mass murderers from Kissinger and Pinochet to the Khmer Rouge after they had killed two million Cambodians she was a zealous saleswoman for the arms industry. The Yale Book of Quotations also states, "Thatcher is said to have used this in a 1965 speech.". Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. 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. In November 1978, Hannaford and I organized a European fact-finding tour for Reagan, and the first stop was London. These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. Instead, her Big Bang blew the roof off City profits and property booms filled the gap where productive industry should have sprouted. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. 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. 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%. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . Edited text: This speech was delivered to the Conservative party conference in Brighton on October 10 1980. 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. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. Though she recognised the dangers of global warming, Thatcher's industrial and economic policies prioritised economic growth. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights. Margaret Thatcher has 43 books on Goodreads with 14026 ratings. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. More insidiously, it fathered amood of tolerated harshness. All can agree that Margaret Thatcher changed the heart of British politics more than any politician since Clement Attlee. . Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. Weakening the power of trade unions was not only essential to her project, but several studies suggest that their continued weakness may be an important part of the reason why inequality has not declined in the intervening decades. morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. 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." She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . Her Irish policy failed miserably. 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. Gloves. 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. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". No single mother raising children was to be called "workless", skipping meals to feed them and forced to ditch them to submit to "workfare" or a starvation wage. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. She was among the first Western leaders to Great speeches: 'Orwellian nightmare' if Tories fail, claims Margaret Thatcher. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. She would not have been half the . Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him a third of the country, according to some polls a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. For the most part, it has not been undone. Hire a Writer. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. It came very hard, getting the words and paragraphs in the right order, a task for which, she eventually admitted, she had hired some help. By John Cassidy. These talks, sometimes joined by the prime minister and run by his aide Rohan Silva, show the restless search for new ideas that still grips the right, one of the least recognised legacies of Margaret Thatcher. To the victors we saycongratulations. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the 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? 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. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. 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. Nations need to know the big picture of where they belong and, coinciding with the Thatcher appearance at the top, clarity had apparently broken through the clouds of historic ambivalence. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. As Danny Dorling says in his 2004 study of the rise in violence: "Those who perpetrated the social violence that was done to the lives of young men starting some 20 years ago [the mid-80s] are the prime suspects for most of the murders in Britain." a new dominance from Brussels". press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982 and steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. And that made it easy to mock her. But the choice captures her perfectly. There are more than 8,000. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. No sign they learned from her that markets don't move in to fill the gaps when the state is rolled back not then, not now. Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. 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. Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. From 1987 to 1988, he was a senior policy writer and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.. O'Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio . see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". A Soviet . 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. They married the personality and belief to action. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. And for the people of Ireland, and especially the north, the Thatcher years were among some of the worst of the conflict. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. What's more, it was moulded to the wall as one commentator recalled and you had no right to change it, not without becoming entangled in a state-managed bureaucracy. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. verbatim and in context. Just look around. the British Embassy in Paris and stated On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of 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. Later, when the BBC and ITV scheduled two programmes about Gibraltar, Thatcher tried to stop them. From her start in politics, Thatcher often attracted sexist critiques for the way she spoke, with many it dubbing her voice "shrill" and "patronizing." Television critic Clive James even compared . led Michael Heseltine to run against her for the party leadership. (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. Two especially forceful and committed leaders on the world stage at the same time: this was critical and key to ending the cold war, permitting the reunification of Germany, the consolidation of the EU and drawing our two nations together in a historic cooperation. Maybe my memory is fanciful. announced that White It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. Today we have four coalmines and around 2,000 miners. 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. 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. This is an especially pertinent problem given its heartfelt desire for redistribution of wealth. The poll-tax rioters. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? Thatcher came to power when the economy was approaching a moment of truth after three decades of poor performance relative to other western countries. Maggie! 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. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, 4.44 avg rating 39 ratings 2 editions. Without it, she would have been nothing. she But unlike Thatcher, president Hugo Chvez of Venezuela, the "president of the poor", fought for a caring economy and against the rule of the market. Much of any leader's record is unremarkable dross, and Thatcher was no exception. Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. She gave Nigel Lawson at the Treasury his head and was genuinely alarmed when he cut income tax to 40%. Not the loss of imperial markets, not lazy management, not the education system, not the decline of the industrial ethic: bitter men standing on platforms and asking for a show of hands to down tools were solely to blame. She defended Ronald Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. Research papers can be complex, so best to give our essay writing service a bit more time on this one. After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle In the 2011 biographical drama film "The Iron Lady," Meryl Streep plays the role of Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. But Thatcher was still cautious. Hugo Young was a political columnist forthe Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. She will be for ever unforgiven by those who now see worse being done in her name to another generation. 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. and I just now watched the British Gas one again. The items stored in this section of the site are texts, but many of the most important statements are also available in audio or video form in the separate Multimedia section. "Margaret Thatcher was not a natural communicator. On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. That did the trick.). 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. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). In this eulogy, Thatcher uses rhetorical strategies to convince her readers into believing what she states. Above all, they lack her competence at running the machinery of government. 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. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. 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 . When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." She gave it her best shot. At its best, that has meant a mood of freedom and choice that has made these islands a brighter, less drab place than they once were. 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. "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. In 1984 Britain had 186 working coalmines and approximately 170,000 coalminers. Trying to trim back spending in her department, she ended the milk subsidies for all children over the age of seven. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya, spoke I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . 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. Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. It knew what Thatcher wanted. She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. This is not the Highland way. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. The credit boom both here and in the USA may have gone against her Grantham roots but was an equally inevitable result of deregulation and the temptation of easy loans for people hungry to improve living standards. They rallied around each other when times were hard. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. Reagan would often hasten to remind those paying tribute to his cold war strategy that it was, in the strictest sense of the term, a team effort. for turning. Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM, 1945-90, edited Christopher In her eulogy for the former president, Thatcher uses specific structure, tone and diction, and word choices throughout her writing to . When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others. "Maggie! performance at a Press Conference afterwards. Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death.

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