Margaret Thatcher
In death as in life Thatcher divides Scotland
A bitter war of words has broken out north of the border as Holyrood looks set to criticise Margaret Thatcher’s legacy in Scotland on the day of her funeral.
Thatcherism saw child poverty grow by 121 per cent
Yesterday we ran a piece on the level of people living in poverty under Margaret Thatcher in response to a claim by Guido Fawkes which claimed the poor had "got richer under Thatcher". I dealt with a lot of this yesterday; but here is another graph showing a bit more straightforwardly the growth in relative poverty during the Thatcher years.
How Margaret Thatcher turned the left upside down
The return of the Conservatives to power in Britain in 2010 has reminded us of just how negative so much of Thatcher’s legacy has been, as they attack public services and the living standards of ordinary people. Thatcher was a disaster for British society, culture and morals. Yet since her intervention of April 1993 into the debate over the former Yugoslavia nobody can justifiably assume simply that ‘left-wing is good; right-wing is bad’. The reality is more complicated.
Margaret Thatcher’s legacy was to ingrain a north-south divide in our body politic
When visiting a factory in Wallsend in 1985, Margaret Thatcher famously turned on a reporter who challenged her over her impact on the region (with unemployment standing at 20 per cent at that time). She replied that the correct response was to highlight success stories "not always standing there as moaning Minnies".
Thatcher’s legacy in Northern Ireland
For Margaret Thatcher, Northern Ireland wasn’t just a political minefield but a personal tragedy. Just months before she took office in 1979, her close friend and ally, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary Airey Neave, who led her campaign for the Conservative Party Leadership, was killed when a bomb, planted by republican terrorists, went off from under his car as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster.
The musical backdrop to the backlash against Thatcherism
From the late 1970s Thatcherism ushered in an unexpectedly rich dimension of music-based protest and activism that pulled together youth movements from the very communities she sought to destroy.