Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. 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. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, (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. 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. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Margaret Thatcher might seem to some like an unlikely pioneer of the need for climate action but, in the late 1980s, she made a series of remarkable speeches and interventions on the subject and . The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. 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. 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. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. 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. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". Plus there's the fact that comedy is now a big business, and there's less money in sharp satire than gentle observation. 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". "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". 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". I was a professional writer. 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. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. We had had a strange relationship. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. The time was 1973. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. Modern comedians complain that they don't have personalities, they don't really stand for anything. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". Steely, certainly. 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. 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. That did the trick.). Less noted . The financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. defended Ronald Opponents and supporters of Margaret Thatcher will never agree about the value of her legacy, but as for her importance, her hypnotic hold on us, they are bound to find common ground. In January 1976 she gave the If they have no bread, let them eat from food banks that's Thatcherism, the legacy we are still to bury before it buries us. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. This is the area where we need to make progress not just in restoring strong local government, but in understanding that democracy means more than a Westminster vote. There are still some great comics doing political material, with Mark Steel and Mark Thomas flying the flag of alternative comedy, while people such as Josie Long and Chris Coltrane find the funny in activism. The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. 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. The machinery of modern political management polls, consulting, focus groups is deployed mainly to discover what will make aparty and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. 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. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. She attacked the Treaty of Maastricht in a performance at a Press Conference afterwards. Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the Iron Lady in "The Crown" is pretty spot-on. 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. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. Gaze at the telephone. All Rights Reserved. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? Thank you, too, Margaret. 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. Indeed, many of the policy innovations associated with Thatcher had already been pioneered by her predecessor. They're not Thatcher. Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. And the miners. The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. Miners had always known that eventually any of the colleries would close and were always prepared to accept that as a fact of life and find employment somewhere else within the industry, but Thatcher's attack was wholesale. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. This zest for ideas was boosted by the 2010 intake, which comprises just under half the parliamentary party. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. Now it was the turn of the words, and no one, of course, would, against all the odds, do them better than the lady who, 25 years before, once thought the sky was beyond her limit. Elton has previously said that he did two minutes about Thatcher and two hours about his knob, and all anyone ever remembered was the Thatcher material. Thatcher came to power when the economy was approaching a moment of truth after three decades of poor performance relative to other western countries. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. . Few would argue that they have not endured. The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. Gloves. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. opportunities. of times. she warned that she was not Promises. At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. On the same edition of Channel 4 News, Louise Mensch named only three successful female politicians as part of her defence ofThatcher and only one of those was a Conservative. The welfare state set out to ensure that no one, in the UK at least, would starve or freeze to death, or suffer or die for lack of medical or other care. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. 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. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer?

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