Women Academics From England

"The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom."

"The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election is he? Oh, if I were going to cut and run I'd have gone after the Falklands. Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Couldn't take it? Couldn't stand it? Right now inflation is lower than it has been for thirteen years, a record the right hon. Gentleman couldn't begin to touch!"

"Peace is not bought cheaply. It cannot be won without cost. The cost of Britain's defence is the price we pay to prevent war. The money for our armed services is truly our “peace tax”. What a cruel irony it is that the word “peace” has been hijacked by those who seek one-sided disarmament. It's ironic because if only one side disarms, the other is far more tempted to aggression. Unilateralism makes war more likely. We who believe in strong defence are the true peace party."

"The point of having nuclear weapons is to deter a war of any kind. They have succeeded in doing so for the past 37 years. To be an effective deterrent a potential aggressor must believe that under certain circumstances such weapons will be used."

"Let me make one thing absolutely clear. The National Health Service is safe with us."

"The spirit of the South Atlantic was the spirit of Britain at her best. It has been said that we surprised the world, that British patriotism was rediscovered in those spring days. Mr. President, it was never really lost."

"The battle for women's rights has been largely won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone for ever. And I hope they are. I hated those strident tones that you still hear from some Women's Libbers'."

"The battle of the South Atlantic was not won by ignoring the dangers or denying the risks. It was achieved by men and women who had no illusions about the difficulties. We faced them squarely and we were determined to overcome...What has indeed happened is that now once again Britain is not prepared to be pushed around. We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new-found confidence—born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away...we rejoice that Britain has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won."

"When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts. The people who thought that Britain could no longer seize the initiative for herself. The people who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did. Those who believed that our decline was irreversible—that we could never again be what we were. There were those who would not admit it—even perhaps some here today—people who would have strenuously denied the suggestion but—in their heart of hearts—they too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in courage, and in resolution. We have not changed. When the demands of war and the dangers to our own people call us to arms—then we British are as we have always been: competent, courageous and resolute."

"We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag. We fought with the support of so many throughout the world: the Security Council, the Commonwealth, the European Community, and the United States. Yet we also fought alone – for we fought for our own sovereign territory."

"I do not believe that people who go on strike in this country have a legitimate cause. Throughout the period of the Labour Government and this one, I have never supported any strikes in this country."

"The battle of the Falklands was a remarkable military operation, boldly planned, bravely executed, and brilliantly accomplished. We owe an enormous debt to the British forces and to the Merchant Marine. We honour them all. They have been supported by a people united in defence of our way of life and of our sovereign territory."

"The fact is that the two major nuclear powers have not gone to war against each other—because, I believe, nuclear weapons are achieving their purpose as a deterrent that makes the prospect of war too horrific. It is noteworthy that, since the last world war, there have been 140 conventional wars, fought with ordinary weapons, which are themselves horrific, and that nuclear weapons have been a deterrent to war. I therefore believe that we should keep them."

"Difficult days lie ahead, but Britain will face them in the conviction that our cause is just and in the knowledge that we have been doing everything reasonable to secure a negotiated settlement. The principles that we are defending are fundamental to everything that this Parliament and this country stand for. They are the principles of democracy and the rule of law...Britain has a responsibility towards the islanders to restore their democratic way of life. She has a duty to the whole world to show that aggression will not succeed and to uphold the cause of freedom."

"Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the marines... Rejoice."

"I am not talking about failure, I am talking about my supreme confidence in the British fleet...superlative ships, excellent equipment, the most highly trained professional group of men, the most honourable and brave members of Her Majesty's Service. Failure? Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? “Failure—the possibilities do not exist”. That is the way we must look at it, with all our professionalism, all our flair and every single bit of native cunning, every single bit of professionalism and all our equipment and we must go out calmly, quietly, to succeed."

"We have to recover those islands, we have to recover them for the people on them are British and British stock and they still owe allegiance to the Crown and want to be British. We have to do what is necessary to recover those islands...When you stop a dictator there are always risks but there are great risks in not stopping a dictator. My generation learned that a long time ago."

"The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own allegiance. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. It is the wish of the British people and the duty of Her Majesty's Government to do everything that we can to uphold that right. That will be our hope and our endeavour and, I believe, the resolve of every Member of the House."

"I must tell the House that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government's objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and are returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment...We cannot allow the democratic rights of the islanders to be denied by the territorial ambitions of Argentina."

"I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure."

"The principle that adequate health care should be provided for all, regardless of ability to pay, must be the foundation of any arrangements for financing the Health Service."

"I count myself among those politicians who operate from conviction. For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word “consensus”. When I asked one of my Commonwealth colleagues at this Conference why he kept saying that there was a “consensus” on a certain matter, another replied in a flash “consensus is the word you use when you can't get agreement”! To me consensus seems to be—the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects.—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner “I stand for consensus”?"

"My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police."

"In this country over the last five years pay has doubled, whereas output has slightly fallen. That is totally different from the position with many of our competitors. Pay in those countries has gone up hand in hand with productivity. Consequently, they have the jobs and we have a larger proportion of the unemployment."

"It was because she offered ‘earnest and practical dissent’ to progressive orthodoxy. Mrs Thatcher is the point at which all snobberies meet: intellectual snobbery, social snobbery, the snobbery of Brooks's, the snobbery about scientists among those educated in the arts, the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial, the snobbery of the South about the North, and the snobbery of men about women."

"In 1980 and 1981 Mrs Thatcher's team (but not the Cabinet) wrestled with the question of how to stop inflation. The new ingredient was courage. Other governments had enforced restraint or cut proposed spending increases. What was wholly exceptional was a government willing to persevere with, indeed intensify, deflationary measures while the bottom fell out of the market. Austerity in prosperity is merely prudent; austerity in adversity requires the courage to put all ordinary political considerations in temporary abeyance. It was this courage of economic liberalism of 1979, which marked out a new determination by government to govern. The new regime of 1979 had not involved any real test of political will, for economic liberalism was and is as uncontentious as any great reversal of assumptions can be. Few, in 1986, were still sighing for the price, wage, dividend and exchange controls of the 1970s. Changing the economic culture was the easy bit. Reducing inflation by a mixture of fiscal and monetary measures, a problem in financial technology, was a far more desperate business... If 1981 was crucial, which it was, it was as a triumph of political will, not of economic doctrine."

"Mrs Thatcher fits the rule that there are no bad Prime Ministers. She may lack Heath's architectonic sense, but more than makes up for it in persuasiveness and electioneering flair. She lacks Callaghan's fatalism, most certainly, but not his caution. She has Eden's wish to meddle, but with the energy to support it. If in many ways she is under-read, her appetite for official papers exceeds that of almost all her predecessors. Had she lost the 1987 election, she would have looked like a curious aberration; since she won, she will be seen as marking a change of epochs, whatever her individual qualities. Whatever the future holds, she will go down as one of history's great improbabilities. For the present, it is perhaps safest to assert that she is the only Prime Minister to cook for her private secretaries when they are working late. She may have slain yesterday's dragon, not today's: her battle was with an archaic union-based socialism, not a pervasive middle-class liberalism. Still, the dragon looked anything but slayable in 1975, and the work had to be done, with but few helpers in her own party. She may outlive the context which made her relevant, but in the process bequeath a broad national governing party. The measure of her achievement is that she has made Thatcherism unnecessary."

"Her strong points were her iron will. I've never known a will like it in politics and I've known a few politicians in my time in various countries. I've never known a man or woman faintly like her, she was as tough as they come, and anything that required guts and will she could do for you. Anything that required sensitivity, she couldn't, she had none."

"My first impression of her was positive: there was absolutely no side to this woman. She treated officials like fully-fledged human beings who (at that stage of her premiership at least) were allowed their say... As you talked, the electric blue eyes bored into you, as if probing you for insincerities or fuzzy thinking. I liked the way she preferred plain speaking, even when she simplified things outrageously, and admired her "can-do" style. If you made your point with conviction and could prove you were right, she would take the argument, while avoiding any appearance of doing so. Watching her in action it struck me that she was composed of two vital elements: strong passions and a sharp intelligence. The trick, you soon learned, was to bring the two together."

"[She has a] patronising elocution voice [and] neat well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that's not exactly vulgar, just low. [It fills me with] a kind of rage."

"Brezhnev took Afghanistan. / Begin took Beirut. / Galtieri took the Union Jack. / And Maggie, over lunch one day, / Took a cruiser with all hands. / Apparently, to make him give it back."

"In Margaret Thatcher, however, Britain had a Prime Minister who was not going to allow peripheral circumstances to get in the way of grim reality... She was faced with making the final, historically momentous decision to permit us to go in and establish a beach-head [on the Falklands]... I am clear that this was easily the biggest single military decision she had to take... There may have been a few politicians, ministers or even servicemen who still doubted her resolve. But Margaret Thatcher never shirked a hard decision. And when asked for her verdict, just a few hours from now, she would not falter."

"On 8 April 2013, former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher died. Street parties broke out across the UK, particularly in working class areas and in former mining communities which were ravaged by her policies. Thatcher's legacy is best remembered for her destruction of the British workers' movement, after the defeat of the miners' strike of 1984-85. This enabled the drastic increase of economic inequality and unemployment in the 1980s. Her government also slashed social housing, helping to create the situation today where it is unavailable for most people, and private property prices are mostly unaffordable for the young. Thatcher also complained that children were "being cheated of a sound start in life" by being taught that "they have an inalienable right to be gay", so she introduced the vicious section 28 law prohibiting teaching of homosexuality as acceptable. Abroad, Thatcher was a powerful advocate for racism, advising the Australian foreign minister to beware of Asians, else his country would "end up like Fiji, where the Indian migrants have taken over". She hosted apartheid South Africa's head of state, while denouncing the African National Congress as a "typical terrorist organisation". Chilean dictator general Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the rape, murder and torture of tens of thousands of people, was a close personal friend. Back in Britain, Thatcher protected numerous politicians accused of paedophilia including Sir Peter Hayman, and MPs Peter Morrison and Cyril Smith. She also lobbied for her friend, serial child abuser Jimmy Savile, to be knighted despite being warned about his behaviour. Thatcher was eventually forced to step down after the defeat of her hated poll tax by a mass non-payment campaign."

"When she became leader of the Opposition in 1975...a meeting...was arranged... She won me over. The strength of her determination and the simplicity of her rational ideas uncluttered by intellectual confusion convinced me that she was the first party leader I had met, apart from Gaitskell, who might check Britain's slide and possibly begin to reverse it. She did not seem much like a Tory but she had the Tory Party to work for her, which was a useful start... Mrs Thatcher is a radical of practical Manchester Liberal descent. She believes that Marx and other economic theorists have not extinguished Adam Smith's truths... Mrs Thatcher has had to puncture illusions and force unpleasant facts on reluctant listeners dreaming of a lazy Utopia, agreeable but unobtainable."

"The other element in Thatcherism is supposed to be the wish to restore Britain as a great power in the world. By this Mrs. Thatcher does not mean primarily a power devoted to the preservation of its own interests. She belongs to that militant Whig branch of English Conservatism which took over when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940. This is to say that her view of foreign policy has a high moral content or, in other words, that she likes to devote herself to large and distant causes – the freedom of Afghanistan rather than the security of Ulster. She is suspicious about the Common Market, but seems prepared to swallow its consequences (e.g. the Single European Act) so long as the blame for them can be attributed to the Foreign Office. I believe that she went into the Falklands with reluctance and regret and that, having done so, she carried it off with a courage and skill of which no other Prime Minister, possibly including Churchill, would have been capable. In terms of theory, however, she has contributed nothing new to the discussion of Britain's role in the world. Margaret Thatcher is a great Prime Minister, great by virtue of her courage and by virtue of what ideologues would often, misguidedly, describe as her "low political cunning"."

"My impression still is that Mrs Thatcher has failed fully to grasp one of the clearest truths about British politics in the 20th century – the truth that the British people are not that much concerned about capitalism (though they are perfectly happy to accept its advantages); in the abstract, they do not understand or like it. They only become enthusiastic for it when it is presented in a patriotic context. Joe Chamberlain knew this; the last Conservative politician to have known it with perfection is Enoch Powell. After that came Margaret Thatcher. She also knows it. Why they like her is because she "speaks for Britain", not because she is a very good economist (though she is probably as bright as any of that bunch), but because she expresses the sentiments and prejudices of the British people."

"Faced with a wilful woman armed with facts and figures, the intelligent question is how best to disarm her. Confronting her is easy; anyone can do that, and lose. Winning against her is the hard part. The best way is to approach her with an argument that is presented crisply and knowledgeably, then stick with it as she tries to find the weak spots. She is intolerant of intellectual slackness, of threadbare arguments and of poor advocacy. She enjoys a good, businesslike argument, provided it is based on solid facts. She always demands thorough research to back up cases, both her own and those of others; this is one of her strongest weapons in advancing her beliefs and objectives. The incautious Minister who fails to learn his Whitehall brief thoroughly will soon find that she has absorbed it in greater detail than he has – and that now she is using it against him. Politics and Government are very serious, professional business for her... Margaret Thatcher...prefers a good argument to a good joke."

"It is difficult to exaggerate either the extent to which research underpins her authority and power or the liking she has for statistics of any sort. Knowledge is power, and she loves retaining almost any sort of knowledge, although with something more than the lawyer's ability to read rapidly and retain facts for only as long as is necessary for a case... It is this enquiring and researching mind, coupled with such a retentive memory and the ability to get to the very heart of the most complex of issues, which underpin her will and authority."

"I took care not to arrange a single meeting between Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative councillors on Barnet Council. For allowing her to sit round the same table would have ended with blood on the floor, and it would not have been hers. That they are Conservative councillors matters little to her. She cannot see a councillor, let alone a bunch of them, without the conviction rising rapidly in her that they could be running their council under a much stricter financial regime."

"I think her greatest achievement is to have made people believe that the impossible is possible. That the things which were said in 1979 to be beyond resolution, the problem of the trade unions for example, she boldly took it on and she did it. If politicians can learn that lesson from her, that there is no problem which is too big to be solved, then she's contributed something enormously important to our life."

"Mr. Breivik, his writings suggest, would have been reluctant to describe himself as a fascist — a common feature of European far-right discourse. He wrote: "I equate multiculturalism with the other hate-ideologies: Nazism (anti-Jewish), communism (anti-individualism) and Islam (anti-Kaffir)." These ideas, it is important to note, were echoes of ideas in mainstream European neo-conservatism. In 1978, the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously referred to popular fears that Britain "might be swamped by people of a different culture." In 1989, Ms Thatcher asserted that "human rights did not begin with the French Revolution." Instead, they "really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity"— in other words, faith, not reason."

"She has an instant appraisal of what you are trying to suggest to her and if you haven't done your homework she'll kill you stone dead – not with words but with a look."

"She is undoubtedly a most formidable communicator. She has the ability to take hold of complex issues and, if you like, simplify them, moralise them, according to her own bourgeois values, and to get them across. She's used it at every platform I've seen her on, from the House of Commons to a party conference, and above all on television and radio. Secondly, I think that she's sensed some of the kinds of moral considerations in politics that underlie people's political and economic attitudes, and I think she has articulated right-wing moral convictions in a more formidable and more committed way than any leader of the right in post-war Britain."

"Mrs Thatcher is beginning to reflect a genuine English nationalist feeling, a deep feeling about the English and how they see themselves in terms of their own history."

"The entire foundation of the "ownership society" is based on new enclosures. And the contrived law to justify contemporary enclosures à la [Richard] Epstein is based on three falsifications...The third deliberate distortion is the reduction of public to individual. Public is used both for government as well as collective interests and community organizations. However, cowboy capitalism reduces society to individuals, and makes community disappear. Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as a society, there are only individuals. Ayn Rand has said there is no such entity as the public, since the public is merely a number of individuals."

"Thatcher could congratulate herself on being, in a very real sense, godmother to the Reagan–Gorbachev relationship."

"To her supporters...Margaret Thatcher left Britain a renewed and invigorated force both at home and on the world stage. She reversed years of national decline. She made Britain again the essential ally of the United States, largely due to her personal relationship with President Reagan, and helped end the Cold War. She turned around the economy and finally tamed the over-powerful unions, who had protected their own interests at the expense of the country's well-being for far too long. She radically overhauled the British state, taking power away from bureaucrats and putting it in the hands of the electorate, who came to enjoy a wealth and a standard of living that they had never known before. On coming to power she found Britain in tatters, and she gave it back its pride and confidence. Her critics, however, are less kind. They point above all to her intensely divisive nature and question the efficacy of many of her policies. The "economic miracle" is largely a myth, they insist, suggesting that recovery was inevitable and that monetarism only prolonged the recession of the early 1980s. Even when recovery came it proved unsustainable and was over-egged by Lawson with her acquiescence, which then led to the harsh recession of the 1990s. While a few became rich under Mrs Thatcher, many missed out on growing prosperity, and the gap between the rich and the poor, and north and south, widened considerably."

"The popularity of Lady Thatcher (as she later became) was due in part to the clarity of her public statements and her ability to persuade the electorate that her convictions corresponded to their wishes – particularity in matters of taxation and opportunity. Her unpopularity among the intellectual and media élite was due both to her right-wing philosophy and to her confrontational approach to those who disagreed with her."

"Mrs Thatcher was the only philosophically interesting prime minister of my adult lifetime. As much by accident as by design she stumbled on issue after issue of high principle, where there were genuinely incompatible moral choices to be made... Attacking socialism as an evil, and casting doubt on the very idea of public service, she forced us to reaffirm – but also to rethink – the place of the collectivist idea in British life and politics and of the social services in civil society. Her ideas, though aligned to right-wing politics, have disturbing affinities to the radical individualism recently in vogue on the left."

"Attacking by turns the Church of England, the higher civil service, the universities, the BBC and the bar, she did as much as the cultural revolution of the 1960s to destabilise the establishment and degentrify public life."