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Be prepared for the next great transfer of wealth. Buy physical silver and storable food.
Every inch the leader: victorious on 1987 election night with Norman Tebbit at Central Office
telegraph.co.uk / By Charles Moore / April 8, 2013
Charles Moore, Baroness Thatcher’s authorised biographer, analyses her personal strengths – and her weaknesses.
Margaret Thatcher loved her country. Like Charles de Gaulle in France, she had a certain idea of it. This idea was forged by a God-fearing, hard-working provincial childhood and by the Second World War. She believed in our strenuous virtues. The British, to her, were brave and free and unique. When, during the Falklands crisis, she suddenly found war leadership thrust upon her, she quoted Shakespeare: ”Nought shall make us rue if England to itself do rest but true.’’ She wanted Britain – and especially England – to be true to itself.
After the Conservative government of Edward Heath lost the general election of February 1974, Mrs Thatcher realised, quite suddenly, that her nation was failing. At home, trade union power, over-government, over-borrowing, high taxes, inflation, were destroying it. On the international scene, Soviet Communism was threatening the future of freedom in the West. Until that time, she had believed, almost deferentially, that the men in charge could put things right. Now she saw that they hadn’t, and couldn’t. She began to think that perhaps a woman could.
Her strong personal ambition and her strong patriotism came together. When her great friend Keith Joseph, Heath’s most prominent critic, decided that he was temperamentally unsuited to the leadership, the way lay clear for her. She challenged Heath, and, in February 1975, she beat him. The party supposed to be the most traditionalist in the world had picked the most radical democratic leader of the post-war era.
Although highly conservative – almost nostalgic – about Britain and its former empire, Mrs Thatcher looked forward. She believed there was little the British people could not do if only government would let them. Thus she was strongly against the compulsory wage control which was the fashion of the age. She wanted people to get richer, but by work, not by trade union muscle. ”We back the workers, not the shirkers,’’ she said. With the rhetoric of the housewife, she turned economics from the dry terrain of technicians into the stuff of daily life and the subject of political combat.
Thanks to BrotherJohnF
2013-04-08 15:02:02
What a croc of crap!!! Evil bovine traitor – pit closures, poll tax, demise of steel industry, yuppie greed culture, Falklands, privatisations,… Took the ”great” out of britain!!