Tuesday 9 April 2013

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher: obituary
Baroness Thatcher, who has died aged 87 from a stroke, was not only Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, she was also the outstanding peacetime leader of the 20th century.
For more than a decade Margaret Thatcher enjoyed almost unchallenged political mastery, winning three successive general elections. The policies she pursued with ferocious energy and unyielding will resulted in a transformation of Britain’s economic performance

 
Photo sourced from Washington Post

The above is a quote from the UK newspaper The Telegraph.
The Evacuation Grounds site tries to have a lower key political focus, usually on the main this site's focus on what is occurring in regional and rural Australia; but I think we can make an exception for this world leader who achieved so much.

The Telegraph has a very comprehensive obituary which they have broken down into sections and provided links to each one.
Margaret Thatcher's obituary in full

1. Early life

2. Entering politics

3. Life in the shadow cabinet

4. The rise to leader

5. From Opposition to Government

6. War on the Left and in the Falklands

7. The miners’ strike and her second term

8. Third term in office

9. Ousted from Downing Street and the leadership

10. Life after politics

The Washington Post has published an interesting read Five myths about Margaret Thatcher

"Britain in the early 1970s was decayed, ungovernable and globally irrelevant, done in by the cumulative effect of postwar socialist reforms. Margaret Thatcher, who came to power as the nation’s first female prime minister in 1979, returned Britain to the realm of the great powers. Worshiped, feted, loathed and mocked, she is one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century. And now Thatcher, as interpreted by Meryl Streep, will be coming to a theater near you in the movie “The Iron Lady,”opening Dec. 30.
But even those most sympathetic to her tend to misunderstand her personality, her governing style and her accomplishments. Let’s examine these misconceptions."

And finally from reason.com, How Margaret Thatcher Brought Economic Freedom to Britain.
This article contains many links and I'll leave you with this quote which tries to answer why the Iron Lady achieved all that she did.

"How did she do it? There are all sorts of possible explanations, including the fact that Britain in the late 1970s, like America, had sunk to such a sorry state that there was a market for solutions that were alternatives to the big-government conventional wisdom. But the point that seems most salient from this distance is Thatcher’s steadfast confidence in the basic principles behind her policies. It was, as she put it in her “Iron Lady” speech, “my defense of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.”"

6 comments:

  1. The UK at the beginning of the 70s was an exciting place to visit. London was still absolutely a place to be, and as the popular hit said, "England Swings Like a Pendulum Do".

    By 1975, the streets were full of uncollected garbage, strikes were the order of the day, and the faces on travellers on the Tube were very sad to behold, indeed. An emotional (and real!)terrible fog had enveloped the Sceptered Isle.

    And then along came maggie, Grocer's daughter, scourge of Las Malvinas, and much, much more. I think David Cameron summed up her legacy very well - she restored hope, pride, relevance and confidence to the Brits.

    Very well done, enduring thanks and RIP, Baroness Thatcher.
    Cheers al

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not only did Margaret Thatcher transform the UK but also played an important role on the world stage together with USA President Ronald Regan, they stopped the cold war.
    This tribute from The Economist, The lady who changed the world

    "On the world stage, too, Mrs Thatcher continues to cast a long shadow. Her combination of ideological certainty and global prominence ensured that Britain played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union that was disproportionate to its weight in the world. Mrs Thatcher was the first British politician since Winston Churchill to be taken seriously by the leaders of all the major powers. She was a heroine to opposition politicians in eastern Europe. Her willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with “dear Ronnie” to block Soviet expansionism helped to promote new thinking in the Kremlin. But her insistence that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom the West could do business also helped to end the cold war."

    ReplyDelete
  3. We also must remember that she was at the beginning of the Man-Made Global warming scare. Jennifer Marohasy details it in This post - a few quotes:
    Margaret Thatcher was no friend of science, but she was a friend of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that was established in the School of Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1972.

    and

    It was following the miner’s strike in the UK and Prime Minister Thatcher’s increasing impatience with Arthur Scargill, then president of the National Union of Mineworkers, that the first tentative links were drawn between coal mining and the possibility of a climate catastrophe.

    and all those who remember Peter Spencer, (although Jen doesn't mention Spencer) she doesn't let John Howard off the hook:

    (from the comments)

    it should be recognised that John Howard was more responsible than any other prime minister for wasting billions of tax payers money closing down irrigated agriculture in the MDB. …he provided the $10billion to make it all happen. such terrible waste.

    Indeed I have no confidence that the Abbot government, assuming there is one post September 14, doesn’t start paying money for carbon sequestration and more… when they should know better.


    The Opposition have a carbon dioxide sequestration program that would cost US, according to their policy, $3.2 billion, or according to Malcolm Turnbull, in an interview:
    MALCOLM Turnbull says Tony Abbott's direct action plan could cost taxpayers $18 billion a year by 2050

    Most of us here agree that CO2 emissions (and especially man-made CO2 emissions) do not cause dangerous global warming -

    AGW - a falsified hypothesis

    Vale The Iron Lady.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Geoff,

      That fancy link of yours does not find the page.
      Here is the page with my slack copy and post and no savvy Java attitude:

      http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/agw-falsified-hypothesis.html

      Delete
    2. Margaret Thatcher later had an about face on man-made global warming: (Link)
      But then in 2003, Thatcher, perhaps seeing the conservative tide turning against her climate legacy, watered down the statements she made two decades earlier, calling climate action a “marvelous excuse for supranational socialism,” and accusing Al Gore—who gained worldwide recognition for similar calls for global cooperation—of “apocalyptic hyperbole.” She wrote in her 2003 book Statecraft that “a new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-center governing classes." She praised President George W. Bush for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, despite her earlier rallying cry for environmental diplomacy.

      Delete
  4. From the IPA Newsletter

    The world has lost a champion for freedom.

    If there's one piece you read on Margaret Thatcher make it this by Conrad Black in the National Review Online on Tuesday. If there's two or three read (in priority) Boris Johnson in The Telegraph, Brendan O'Neill from Spiked, and Peter Oborne also from The Telegraph

    ReplyDelete

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