She fervently believed the market would soon repair their loss. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. Thatcher exposed the sharp edges of class division in Britain and the strike of 1984/5 was as much a clash of values as it was about pit closures. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. The former reporter, who was 90, died with his family around him yesterday lunchtime, a statement said. She undoubtedly rescued the prestige of the country from its postwar nadir, but at a high cost to the generosity of its political and social culture. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. 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." The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. Hire writer now Order. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. September 25, 2020. But these concrete achievements do not wholly explain why she still looms so large, large enough that not one but two current West End plays The Audience and Billy Elliot grant Thatcher a pivotal, if largely unsympathetic, role, whether seen or unseen. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. In January 1976 she gave the All rights reserved. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? 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. But Labour is no less in thrall. This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. Each now seems banal. . Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. Words. So what caused this great divide, with one side a fountain of fresh ideas and the other struggling for new inspiration? The events of that awful summer of '81 polarised Irish society, north and south. 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. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White Without it, she would have been nothing. After leaving office, MT widened and deepened her criticism of the European She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. (Interestingly, Currie also recalled that when she approached Thatcher in 1988 to get approval for the world's first national breast-screening programme, she tried to appeal to the PM initially "as a woman" but that swiftly proved unsuccessful. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association. speech in the House of Commons, her 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". You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. 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. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. The dockers. first television interview the following day. 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. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen. We have his example. That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. 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. On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest. We liked disliking her. 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. 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. 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. She was catapulted into the Conservative leadership by a small group of ideologues centred around a thinktank, determined to roll back the statist ideas that dominated Britain after the postwar Attlee government. 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 she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. camps were revealed in August 1992. By 1990 it was transformed. When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot (20 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. 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. Her imitators swerve all over the place, with 37 U-turns at the Telegraph's latest count on matters from forests and pasties to buzzard nests and caravans. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. of times. But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . (MT gave up public speaking in March 2002.) "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 most important thing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did for British politics was to understand the significance of Thatcherism and to decide not to reverse it, indeed to carry it forward. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. By raising the pay of their own staff to a minimum of the living wage, they have set an example which a growing number of large private-sector employers have followed. 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. The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. 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. 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. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. But this didn't come without a price. 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. She, for one, never underestimated her friend from California, then a state of some 24 million. Sayle recorded the song Get Me Mrs Thatcher, but says that in general he felt Thatcher jokes were a bit too easy, although he still shudders at the memory of a "wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s". For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues.