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Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children' 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. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate? " John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Thatcher, Blair et les défaites de la gauche britannique. Leçons du « néogramscisme » « Thatcher est morte, vive le thatchérisme ! », semblent s'écrier les élites néolibérales, au pouvoir ici et ailleurs, de droite comme de "gauche". Evidemment, nous ne pleurerons pas pour notre compte celle qui – outre son soutien sans faille au général Pinochet et sa responsabilité dans la mort de Bobby Sands et de ses camarades – fut « le premier ministre le plus diviseur et destructeur des temps modernes » (Ken Loach).

Mais il importe avant tout d’analyser le thatchérisme et son emprise contemporaine, pour en tirer des leçons politiques ; c’est à cela que s’emploie Fred Falzon dans l'étude que nous publions ici. Initialement parue en 2009 dans la version imprimée de Contretemps, elle porte sur les graves défaites subies par la gauche britannique, toutes tendances confondues, sous les gouvernements de Thatcher puis Blair. De manière rétrospective, le thatchérisme apparaît comme la première vague d’une déferlante néolibérale qui s’est abattue, depuis, sur l’Europe et le monde. In Pictures | Thatcher years in graphics. Click through to see some of the social and economic changes in Britain during the Thatcher era, 1979-90. Britain began to consume more luxury goods as the service sector boomed and parts of society became wealthy. The 1980s saw a pit closure programme which sparked a year-long miners' strike.

From 1979 council tenants were given the right to buy their homes. It was a hugely popular policy. Average income rose during the 1980s but so did inequality. Air travel became cheaper and an increasing number of people chose to holiday abroad. The early 1980s saw a recession as monetary policy was tightened. A boom in parts of the economy helped prices rise. The rampant inflation of the 1970s was gradually brought under control as interest rates were raised. Interest rates were raised to deal with inflation, as part of the Conservatives' new monetarist policy. There was a rush to buy shares as hitherto state-owned industries such as gas were privatised. In 1979 Thatcher pledged to break union power. The Tale of Mrs. Thatcher and the UMSU | The Bucket Journal. The Tale of Mrs. Thatcher and the UMSU Posted on 10 April 2013 by The Bucket Editorial Peter Green Ah student politics, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. Let’s be honest, as students, we don’t expect much from student unions.

Let’s put aside for a moment what they actually did, except to note that it was about as far from the purview of a university student union as it is possible to imagine. There are many reasons to dislike Mrs. Margaret Thatcher dies: latest. VersoBooks.com. So they win again. If anything is to be taken from the miserable time we endured last week, it must be to learn some lessons about how the enemy operates. It couldn’t have worked much better from their point of view. A series of punitive attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable in society ended up being simultaneously cloaked and justified by the brazen hijacking of an appalling, aberrant act of violence.

This is one part of the “legacy of Thatcher” that we will be invited to reflect upon in the coming days. The bitter edge to all those leftist celebrations of Thatcher’s death is all too evident. The Tories have long been struggling with the problem of how to escape Thatcher’s shadow while continuing her project. Meanwhile, Labour shuffles uncomfortably in the shadows, looking at its feet, before offering up its depressing policy review on the future of welfare.

The implication of all this is not that we should withdraw from the debates the right imposes. Thatcher's Dead But Thatcherism Thrives. On the day that news reached us of the death of Margaret Thatcher, it's appropriate to reflect on the significance of the Iron Lady for Australia. Her death is big news around the world because of her pivotal role in the late 20th century's battle for ideas. Thatcher was not just a cold warrior and union buster who swept a new broom through the sclerotic British economy. She was perhaps most important because she came to be seen as the personification of neoliberalism. Long after the hatred for Thatcher herself became a matter for history, the economic ideas she pursued linger on. Margaret Thatcher remains controversial today because, more than any other politician in the English-speaking world, she symbolises the ideal of the free market as the single dominant philosophy of conservative politics.

The IPA is Australia's most notorious conservative, free-market think-tank. In part, this is because of post-war Britain's pursuit of cradle-to-grave welfarism. Thatcher, the ALP & the dregs of neoliberalism. If there’s one thing the entire Australian Left agrees on right now it’s that “Thatcherism was a very bad thing”. But beyond that, it may be appropriate to ask what exactly it is that people think was a bad thing. The answer to that question rests on one’s interpretation of what exactly was going on in the high neoliberal period of the 1980s, and what followed it. There is an uncomfortable fact that many local progressives are also trying to dance around, one that impacts on their view of the domestic political situation.

That fact is that the highpoint of the ALP’s federal political success with the Hawke and Keating governments shared much of its DNA with Thatcher’s neoliberalism, here understood as a political project to shift the balance of forces in the class struggle towards capital, and thereby enact a historic redistribution of wealth and power upwards. The original Accord envisaged wages policy as a component in a broader program of progressive economic and social reform.

Margaret Thatcher: 'Ding Dong!' sing the foes of Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher: a lady loved and loathed From world leaders to locals, it seems everyone has an opinion of the late former British PM Margaret Thatcher. P 9, 2013 USUALLY, when a public figure dies, even their staunchest enemies briefly suspend hostilities in respect for the dead. Thatcher described Nelson Mandela as a 'terrorist'. I was there. But with Margaret Thatcher that was never going to be the case. Revellers celebrate the death of Britain's former prime minister Margaret Thatcher at a party in Brixton, south London. For some, the wounds left by Thatcher's Britain are still raw. Advertisement By mid-afternoon on the day of Lady Thatcher's death, the editor of the London Daily Telegraph announced he had closed comments on every Thatcher story. "Even our address to email tributes is filled with abuse," he said.

A woman celebrates the death of the former British PM. ‘‘I’m very, very pleased. With AFP. Margaret Thatcher, between myth and politics. Above: Margaret Thatcher greeting curious Moscovites gathered in Moscow during her visit to the Soviet Union in March 1987. Photo: Daniel Janin/ AFP First published 12 January 2012 THIS is not the kind of comeback Margaret Thatcher would ever have wanted. There was a time, in the wake of her tearful departure from 10 Downing Street in November 1990, when she seemed to be holding on to the dream of recovering Britain’s prime ministership.

But the whirligig of time has its ravages, its revenges and its rewards. The baroness will not see, let alone cast any beady-eyed verdict on, The Iron Lady. MARGARET Thatcher’s top-rank political career spanned only twenty years, now a shorter period than the one since that red-eyed resignation. Margaret Thatcher became member of parliament for the north London seat of Finchley in 1959, a foot soldier in the Conservatives’ third successive national victory.

THE long march of Thatcherism had begun.