margaret thatcher speech writer
Not all writers were against her. She considered European Commission president Jacques Delors a campaigner for . We liked disliking her. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. All can agree that Margaret Thatcher changed the heart of British politics more than any politician since Clement Attlee. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. We were wary of this. It is full of insights into a neglected aspect of how Thatcher came to dominate British politics." (Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield, UK) "A fascinating insight into the world of speech writing. Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status. 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. Instead, her Big Bang blew the roof off City profits and property booms filled the gap where productive industry should have sprouted. Prime Minister Thatcher inherited a settled state of British Europeanness, in which Brussels and the [European] Community began to influence, and often determine, the British way of doing things. Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? She was able to reach Yet despite the attempts of some columnists to claim otherwise, Thatcher can't really be seen as "a warrior in the sex war", let alone as "the ultimate women's libber". In a twitter of panic, Labour shadow ministers sent out pleas yesterday: "Hoping all Labour supporters will respond with dignity and respect to news of Baroness Thatcher's death." There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die. 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. Her onslaught on the trade unions left those movements pale imitations of their former selves, too weak to resist the drive to the "flexible labour market" which has seen Britain become the home of what one senior Labour figure calls "crappy jobs", with low pay and no protection. Superlatives can be agreed: a remarkable first woman PM; the first winner of three elections in a row; brave; tough; relentless; clever; sleeplessly driven by a self-confident conviction that overawed her enemies. 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. . 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. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not Women aren't always good for other women because the gender of a person matters a lot less than that person's actual beliefs. 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. Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". To the victors we saycongratulations. There's still the rage, still the unfairness, so where is the comedy? Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. It knew what Thatcher wanted. It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. Edited and full versions of Margaret Thatcher's 'The lady's not for turning' speech, delivered at the Conservative party conference in Brighton on 10 October 1980 June 5, 1992 - Is named a life peer on the Queen's honor list. The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . Had pollsters and the 24/7 media forced leaders to follow opinion, not lead it? Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. 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. for turning. He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. 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." She invited the Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. After leaving office, MT widened and deepened her criticism of the European 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. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. 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. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' When the mourners gather for Baroness Thatcher's funeral tomorrow, one important figure from her political past will be . At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. In 2009, Boris Johnson lamented that Thatcher had become "a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor.". Gaze at the telephone. 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. Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. Leaving aside the detail that the word "feminist" came into existence in 1895, comfortably in Chanel's lifetime, the woman who valued femininity above all other qualities in a woman and was heavily involved with the Nazis, including a wartime relationship with German officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, could not, in any circumstances, be described as a feminist. On Saturday, 27 February, he wrote in his diary: "PM getting great press went up to the [Capitol] Hill some of the senators tried to give her a bad time, she put them down firmly and with typical British courtesy.". The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? decision to resign. 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. 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. At Cheltenham the following month she We have his example. 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. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society. 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. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher's Britain. 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. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary.