In 1990, Margaret Thatcher emerged as one of the first world leaders to champion climate science, issuing a call to action to fight manmade global warming at the Second World Climate Conference hosted at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. That said, by the mid-1980s it was clear that the Conservative government's economic policy was based on a handful of core principles. ROBIN HARRIS worked for the Conservative Party from 1978, and increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. This was the feminine creature who, two years later, was leader of the Conservative party. 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. Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. 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". 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. 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. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. The preface to the Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. Margaret Thatcher had planned to attack Labour's unwillingness to condemn picket-line violence in her 1984 conference speech but changed her mind when an IRA bomb hit The Grand Hotel in Brighton. 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. Her vision for Britain made a lot of people feel like outsiders, which made them the ideal audience for comedy. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. But if today's Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow's TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. Donning a starched coiff and padded shoulders out to there, Emmy Award winner Gillian Anderson of The X-Files is . 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. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. 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. as far as can be known. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. In 1982, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a church for 12 days in protest against "police illegality and racism in King's Cross" the area to which many sex workers known as "Thatcher's girls" had travelled from high unemployment areas in the Midlands and the north. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. 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. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). But she exploited her luck. 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. One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. Today's Tories walk in Thatcher's footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. 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. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. April 17, 2013, 6:40 PM. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". The US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. Steely, certainly. She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. 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.". These developments set a benchmark. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. Maybe it was the sound of the estuary pronunciation robbing her of her aspirational airs, a prototype of the Bouquet/Bucket joke. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. 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. 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". It's true that whenever there's a major news story, millions of people immediately begin strip-mining it for puns and bon mots, making it harder for professional comics to develop focused, funny material that nobody's heard before. She fervently believed the market would soon repair their loss. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. This was her last important public statement. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. Hugo Young was a political columnist forthe Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour's unelectable Michael Foot and the Falklands war. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". In January 1983 she Far from "smashing the glass ceiling", she was the aberration, the one who got through and then pulled the ladder up right after her. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. 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%. As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. It made minor savings at best and was, as the . For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. Philip Larkin visited Downing Street where the prime minister quoted approvingly one of his lines to him "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives." Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. He was listened to with rapt attention, unsurprisingly, since in both Washington and Westminster his "nudge" theories are saving significant sums of taxpayers' money. Less noted . The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? If the Falklands war was the making of Thatcher, then the poll tax was her achilles heel not least in Scotland. The evidence shows that greater equality provides the foundation on which higher standards of social wellbeing can be built. Margaret Flowers is a leading activist, doctor, teacher, and co-founder of PopularResistance.org, a website that aims to inform and inspire grassroots movements around the world. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete I am reminded of this every time the debate comes up about whether more female bylines would reduce sexism in the media. The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. performance at a Press Conference afterwards. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time, gave a eulogy to the grieving American people in honor of the late Ronald Reagan on June 11th, 2004. At times the Conservative party is so anarchic as to appear almost ungovernable, like a plethora of pressure groups pushing pet causes rather than a united group ruthlessly focusing on political success. Take the larger view. The government's job was to keep inflation low, not to boost growth through demand management. For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. That bonuses and top incomes continue to rise while the incomes of the rest of the population struggle to keep up with inflation tells us that what we needed was legislation to ensure employee representation on company boards and remuneration committees as many of our European partners have. Above all, they lack her competence at running the machinery of government. I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher. 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. Thatcher and Reagan went on to facilitate a colossal transfer of wealth from poor to rich, leading to the world economic crash we now witness. I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. Instead state assets and a huge income stream from North sea oil were used to fund a populist programme of tax cuts, privatisation and council housesales. Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. The British inflation was in 1975 up at 24, 11% [] and with the union's constant claim for higher salaries, nobody expected it to drop to a normal level. Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We All can agree that Margaret Thatcher changed the heart of British politics more than any politician since Clement Attlee. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? Mrs Thatcher was on the way up in British political life. The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. Norman and Margaret hold, and will always hold, a unique place in our esteem and affection. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes, prayed on the If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide itcannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history. Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . The papers date from Margaret Thatcher's childhood to the end of her life, and include tens of thousands of photographs, as well as a vast collection of press cuttings, and many audio and video tapes of public and private events.