Generation Right video transcript

GENERATION RIGHT TRANSCRIPT

MARGARET THATCHER (00:08) – Ideas can move mountains, and they can bring about whole changes in attitudes.

MARGARET THATCHER (00:15) - Thatcherism is much older than me. It is based on fundamental common sense. Government has really tried to stop a good deal of individual liberty.

MARGARET THATCHER (00:28) – Whatever you do, you're personally responsible for it and you don't blame society for anyone. 

MARGARET THATCHER (00:30) – I believe that we have altered the whole course of British politics for at least a generation.

SPEAKER (00:37): Britain was a world power. When statesmen like Winston Churchill talked, people listened.

BACKGROUND (00:44): God save the Queen.

SPEAKER (00:49): Human freedom is today threatened by regimented statism.

SPEAKER (00:57): The Communists severed Berlin with a wall in August 1961.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: (01:02) We have no desire to dominate or conquer any other nation.

SPEAKER (01:10): The affluence of the industrial city is reflected in the luxurious residences of professional people and leaders of industry.

SPEAKER (01:40): Margaret Hilda Thatcher, favourite to become Europe's first woman prime minister after forcing out Britain's minority Labour government.

INTERVIEWEE (1:51): We come out of this sort of short optimistic period of the '60s into a '70s that was strike ridden, shabby and decaying.

INTERVIEWEE (02:05): The country was really on its knees and most of the informed commentators could not really see a way out.

INTERVIEWEE (02:15): In the years that go by it has become more and more certain that something must be done.

INTERVIEWEE (02:22): There was a mindset that politics was drifting steadily to the left. Therefore, the conservative parties were always wanting to make the nationalized industries work better rather than to denationalize them or anything as radical as that.

INTERVIEWEE (02:38): Margaret Thatcher was the person against all the odds who changed all that.

SPEAKER (02:45): And as the results come in, it was soon known that Britain had its first woman prime minister.

SPEAKER (03:00): Here comes the Prime Ministerial Rover bearing now Mrs. Thatcher as Prime Minister.

MARGARET THATCHER (03:12): I know full well the responsibilities that await me as I enter the door of number 10, and I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi that I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. Where there is despair, may we bring hope.”

SPEAKER (03:48): The conservatives have a history of trying to hold down personal taxation, but tax cuts have to be paid for. Inevitably, that means reducing public expenditure which can affect such emotive programs as health, education and aid for industry and areas of high unemployment. Giving the Tories better aim for protecting the middle-class at the expense of the poor and underprivileged.

MARGARET THATCHER (04:11): Under a conservative government, this will go hand-in-hand with a new economic climate. A climate of opportunity and enterprise. Less tax, less regulation, more flexibility, more freedom. Those will be our guidelines.

INTERVIEWEE (05:10): There were worries about communism, there were worries about fascism. They came to see almost any form of interventionist government as resulting in some form of kind of great reduction of freedom to people.

DANNY DORLING (04:31): There were worries about communism, there were worries about fascism, and they came to see almost any interventionist government as resulting in some kind of great reduction of freedom for most people.

LORD HURD OF WESTWELL (04:40): We got to the point in the middle 1970s (1973 or 1974), where it looked as if whatever policy of the elected government, the trade unions would wreck it.

MARGARET THATCHER: (05:02): Unions can only prosper when the nation prospers, and vice versa. As a song about love and marriage pointed out: “This I tell you, brother, you can't have one without the other.” (Laughing and clapping).

DAVID AARONOVITCH: (05:20): All of a sudden you could see that the things that you felt you built your certainties upon, weren't uncertainties at all. They could actually and would actually be dismantled so the unions would be taken on.

SPEAKER: (05:32): Since Mrs. Thatcher took power after the 1979 “Winter of Discontent”, the unions have been in decline. Particularly those in the public sector. Of the major unions, only the minors remain unbowed.

INTERVIEWEE: (05:46): What else is there in this community apart from mining? There is nothing. There is absolutely nothing for the men to do. That's why we are going to fight. That's why we will fight, and at the end of the day, we will win. By how much? We will come to answer that.

MAN WITH SPEAKERPHONE: (05:59): To reaffirm the unanimous decision of March 8 to declare it official in accordance with rule 41, the strike action is – –(crowd roars and cheers).

INTERVIEWEE (6:10): The miner's strike was the maximum point of polarization. It was an event in the way that it happened, that you just could not have anticipated ten, twenty, thirty years earlier.

SPEAKER: (6:22): At the end of Britain's Industrial Age, all greed was a confrontation from the Middle Ages.

INTERVIEWEE (6:30): The National Council for Civil Liberties simply wants to establish what the implications are in terms of civil liberties.

MARGARET THATCHER (06:38): “I must tell you, that what we've got, is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed.” (audience clapping). It must not succeed. There are those who are using violence and intimidation and impose their will on others who do not want it.”

DAVID AARONOVITCH (07:04): In essence, it turned the miner strike into a law-and-order issue. It allowed the government to suggest, that what actually was happening here was an attempt to stop people doing what they lawfully wanted to do, which was to get work, and to an extent, that was true.

SPEAKER (07:17): Former Chief Constable John Alderman said today that restrictions on the movement of minors was similar to South African laws that stopped certain racial groups from travelling freely.

INTERVIEWEE (07:29): I mean, it is virtually like the past law. You can't move out of your own region where it without permission. Now we associate that not with British democracy, but with totalitarianism.

INTERVIEWEE (07:39): Never mind the “Leftocrat,” who said about the Germans and Hitler. We call Hitler “--- in skirts” in this country.

DAVID AARONOVITCH (07:48): She said in turn, “I don't like consensus.”

MARGARET THATCHER (07:54): “Yes, I am an Iron Lady. After all, it wasn't a bad thing to be an Iron Duke. Yes, if that is how they would like to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.”

ALAN WALKER (08:10): What she was trying to do was to change the nature of Britain.

MARGARET THATCHER (08:13): This is the British character. It is enterprising, it is responsible. It will take the initiative. It wants to look after its own family. It wants to make its own decisions.

BARONESS LISTER OF BURTESETT (08:25): She wanted to change the way people thought and felt and make people stand on their own two feet and not look to the state for support.

MARGARET THATCHER (08:33): There is only one way to do well. There is no magic about it. It is the way I am trying to follow. I am saying to people that you can't avoid the consequences of your own actions.

SPEAKER (08:45): The Thatcher philosophy is that things will get worse before they can get better. Everyone must make sacrifices.

BARONESS LISTER OF BURTESETT (08:52): They felt that people had to suffer in order to achieve whatever they wanted to achieve.

BARON HOWARD OF LYMPNE (08:56): We had to change the way we were doing things as a country. We were not on the right track.

SPEAKER (09:03): Do you see yourself as we see you, as a very radical figure who wants to substantially change a lot of things in our society, a lot of things that have happened since the war, who wants to roll back to a sort of individualistic society?

MARGARET THATCHER (09:19): I think government's gotten into far too many areas, far too many decisions in society, and government really has tried to stop a good deal of individual liberty. I want to go from the present, flat, non-expansion, non-growth, non-incentive society to what I would call an incentive enterprise package.

MARGARET THATCHER (09:45): Our job is to see that the industry has good management and has the resources to invest in the future.

DAVID AARONOVITCH (10:33): The background of Thatcherism was that it did not claim to simply be a pragmatic response to what was happening and tested out elsewhere. It also laid claim to a rather intellectual foundation.

MARGARET THATCHER (10:46): All my upbringing was to instil into my sister and I a fantastic sense of duty. A great sense of whatever you do, you are personally responsible for it. You don't blame society for anyone, society isn't anyone.

DANNY DORLING (11:01): Margaret Thatcher really hated weakness. She hated signs of weakness. You need to help the strong. You need to let them lead. You need wealth creators to create jobs and huge amounts of money. People should be thankful for the jobs they can get from them and we must not hold them back.

BARONESS LISTER OF BURTESETT (11:15): One aspect of Thatcherism was a kind of a social conservatism around the family. 

THATCHER INTERVIEWER (11:19): Have you been able to combine your political life with looking out after a family running a home?

MARGARET THATCHER (11:26): Well, I mainly do the catering here. I like cooking and I do the shopping and always a big batch of cooking at the weekend, and of course, there are parliamentary recesses which coincide with the school holidays so I can see quite a good bit of the children and take them out and at halftime they come out to the house and have lunch with me.

INTERVIEWEE (11:43): There was her scientific background. She was, after all, an industrial chemist in her first creation.

SPEAKER (11:52): Though she trained as a barrister specializing in tax law, Mrs. Thatcher has held various portfolios, including science. She spent four years as a research chemist after leaving University at Oxford.

INTERVIEWEE (12:03): There was her non-conformist Christianity and her lower middle-class background and if you understood the relationship between those three, you generally understood Thatcher.

SPEAKER (12:18): Mrs. Thatcher seems to be very different from the sort of Tory leader we have been used to. Surprisingly, in a secular society, she claims that the roots of her political beliefs lie in Christianity, the Old Testament, and Greek philosophy, which hold that the freedom of the individual is sacred.

MARGARET THATCHER (12:43): I believe that by taking together the key elements from the Old and New Testament, we gain a view of the Universe, a proper attitude to work, and principles to shape economic and social life.

SPEAKER (12:56): She believes that each individual is, whatever their talents or abilities or chances of success or failure, must be viewed in the eye of God.

MARGARET THATCHER (13:07): The Tenth Commandment, “Thou Shall Not Covet” recognizes that making money and owning things could become selfish activities, but it is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but love of money for its own sake. The spiritual dimension comes in deciding what one does with the wealth.

SPEAKER (13:29) – The principle that individuals solve their own problems does of course clash with the prevailing philosophy of the post-war era. It has been taken for granted that it is the government's duty to pursue equality by providing for the community as a whole.

ALAN WALKER (13:43): She wanted to reign back not just spending, but in her sense, that the British were somehow wedded to what you called dependency.

BARONESS LISTER OF BURTESETT (13:55): I suppose what strikes me today is the extent to which they shifted the ground, really, and they shifted the whole common sense around Social Security.

ALAN WALKER (14:08): On the one hand, there were very significant cuts in benefits, but on the other hand, public expenditure on Social Security actually rose, and the explanation for that is very clear. It's unemployment.

SPEAKER (14:19): Nationwide, over ten percent of the workforce is unemployed and now that the recession is hurting even areas of traditional conservative support, Mrs Thatcher could find herself in trouble next time voters go to the polls. So far, she has shown no sign of changing her policies.

INTERVIEWEE (14:38): You can see the job fear in Thatcherism as a kind of storm. The storm began up on the Clyde and up on the Tyne and in the places where the shipbuilding simply stopped and whole communities suddenly found there was no work for them. The storm spread down the country and down the north. It hit the cities. It even hit parts of the East end of London.

SPEAKER (15:10): There was no doubt about the support given to the job marchers when they reached Wolverhampton and Industrial West Midlands, midway through their journey to London.

INTERVIEWEE (15:20): You had jobs upon which communities had relied for thirty, forty, fifty years, and just suddenly went. They were not there anymore.

MARGARET THATCHER (15:33): Eighty percent are in work. Yes, we have to try to get work to twenty percent. Some of the work that is being done is fantastically successful. Don't you think that's the way to persuade more companies to come to this region and get more jobs because I want them, for the unemployed. Not always standing there as moaning minnies. Now stop it!

SPEAKER (15:58): The job marchers and the left wing opposition remain just as firmly unconvinced about the conservative policies. The rally also reflects the deep filled anger in many parts of Britain against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her government.

INTERVIEWEE (16:17): A lot of the unemployment was in industries which were no longer competitive. We had to earn our living in the world. We were not a closed-off economy.

TRADE COUNCIL SPEAKER (16:22) – Don't be fooled by a moment by Mrs. Thatcher and her friends in Fleet street where they say there is no other way. The way is her choice. The policies are Tory policies. The outcome is the outcome of unrestrained capitalism.

MARGARET THATCHER (16:38): If I could press a button and genuinely solve the unemployment problem, do you think I would not press that button this instant? Does anyone imagine that there is the smallest political gain in letting this level of unemployment continue? That there is some obscure economic religion which demands this level of unemployment as part of its grisly ritual?

LYN MATTHEWS (17:01): I think that there was a deliberate attempt to make people unemployed because it makes you subservient then. It keeps you down.

DAVID BLUNKETT (17:09): All of us that lived through the premiere-ship of Margaret Thatcher will remember the complete disconnect between what she said that she wanted for Britain and what was actually happening.

SPEAKER (17:31) Why can't the Prime Minister explain, having in fact brought about in these last two years the highest level of unemployment since 1934, and can she really deny after two years that she now heads the most hated Tory government in this country for at least two generations?

MARGARET THATCHER (17:44) – Most people in this country realize that the steps that have been taken were necessary to put an industry in a healthy condition to compete, and unless the government had had the courage to take them, the long-term unemployment in this country would have been much, much worse.

BARON HOWARD OF LYMPNE (18:01) – Of course we were concerned about unemployment, but the changes which were put in place were absolutely necessary.

SPEAKER (18:14): Local authorities, new towns and housing associations have a long established record of building accommodations for rent, but many local authorities are now complementing this policy by providing low-cost homes for first time buyers. In Birmingham's inner-city area, there is considerable demand for low-cost housing. Land has been sold to a developer for this purpose, thereby taking some of the pressure off of the local authority and easing its own workload.

MARGARET THATCHER (18:42): Half a million more people will now live and grow up as freeholders with a real stake in the country and with something to pass on to their children. There is no prouder word in our history than freeholder. Mr. President, this is the largest transfer of assets from the state to the family in British history and it was done by a conservative government.

ALAN MURIE (19:15): We dismantled state housing by transferring a lot of the best council houses to tenants, so you have the poorest people concentrated to a greater extent in the least attractive parts of the city. Not surprisingly, those areas became associated with high levels of crime, weaker social networks and weaker controls because of high turnover. It is a recipe for disorder to start in places that don't work.

SPEAKER (19:56): The government has allowed its scheme to provide homes and care for mentally ill people living in squalor. However, the plan, which was created for a few hundred, was dismissed as a street cleaning exercise with little hope for the majority. This former hospital for sick children was abandoned through lack of funding. Now, it is providing a room with a view for some of the hundreds of young people who pour into London full of hope and lose it there.

LYN MATTHEWS (20:28): Generational kids that grew up in the Eighties, grew up with no hope. Being unemployed became a way of life for people.

INTERVIEWEE (20:48): What quickly followed that, was an influx of drugs and heroin.

ALAN MATTHEWS (20:56): The thing is, Heroin came along and gave these kids a full time job. Heroin moved into the vacuum created by unemployment.

SPEAKER (21:08): Police teams need to get in fast before the drugs disappear.

SPEAKER (21:18): The use of hard drugs has reached epidemic proportions and children as young as nine are taking heroin.

JOSIE POTTS (21:25): It used to be outside schools, trying to deal to kids, and you used to see needles in the gutter as well. It was an epidemic.

INTERVIEWEE (21:36): The consequence of this, of course, is that communities that have enormous cohesion where people were used to taking on adversity together were fractured and fragmented. It is sadly the case that when you have to change things, that involves a certain amount of dislocation and disruption and there are inevitably going to be losers as well as winners.

ALAN WALKER (22:19): We saw the advent of terms like scroungers on the welfare state.

SPEAKER (22:24): Many people are becoming angry and desperate, but most unemployed do not regard themselves as belonging to the work-shy or the scroungers often referred to by conservative speakers.

DAVID AARONOVITCH (22:35): It felt like it became a language of obliteration, that there were things and people that she didn't think ought to be here and if you like, her famous phrase, “we're the enemy within.” What you were effectively being told was, this country doesn't belong to you, you are not a part of it. Actually, you are a part of the problem.

DANNY DORLING (22:56): Margaret Thatcher talked about swamp pit. She talked about immigration as bad, she talked about the country's character being changed. She almost gave a green light to thugs to attack young people in these cities.

PROTESTER INTERVIEWEE (23:12): If something is not done at the present time, it is going to be a highly explosive situation.

MARGARET THATCHER (23:36): Everyone has freedom of choice, and everyone has personal responsibility for their actions. Yes, there are good and evil in everyone. I wish that above all, that one could wave a magic wand and get crime down. Man is given freedom of choice, and I am afraid the same thing that gives us power to do good is that same freedom that gives some the power to do evil.

MARGARET THATCHER (24:26): I think we are all just deeply, profoundly worried. In a country like ours, where we are tolerant, we are fair-minded, we believe that everyone is truly equal before the law, everyone is entitled to equal protection from the police and should help the police. This shouldn't have happened. We were horrified at the Brixton and Toxteth riots.

SPEAKER: (25:02): Does the Prime Minister appreciate that throughout the whole of our recorded history, Britain has never experienced an increase in crime as has occurred as since she was first elected on a platform of law and order.

MARGARET THATCHER (25:15): The honourable gentleman is aware that crime has been rising not only in this country, but throughout the Western world and it has in fact steadily risen and I say so that it makes it all the more important for governments to do what this one has. Namely, to provide for more police, for better equipment, and to support the police in their courts in their difficult decisions.

INTERVIEWEE (25:40): I think that in Thatchers view, the prime cause of crime was human wickedness.

INTERVIEWEE (25:49): To say that people are evil, because they committed those crimes. It is not that they are evil, it is that they are desperate.

INTERVIEWEE (25:55): I have never believed that being poor or being disadvantaged equalled crime, but I do believe very strongly that the disintegration of community is almost bound to have an impact. I don't think that explaining crime in terms of some quite different phenomenon makes sense. Crime is crime is crime.

MARGARET THATCHER (26:24): People have asked me whether I am going to make the fight against crime an issue of the next election. No, I am not going to make it an issue, it is the people of Britain who are going to make it an issue.

DAVID AARONOVITCH (26:40): There are huge gaps in what we call Thatcherism, and there wasn't a Thatcherite theory of crime.

DANNY DORLING (26:46): There was a paradox in that Margaret Thatcher was obsessed with crime. One of her earliest things she did as new MP was to vote with six elderly men to try and help bring Bircher back into the country, but her policies — the policies of allowing mass unemployment to rise and poverty resulting in an increase of property crime.

BARON HOWARD OF LYMPNE (27:18): I took the view when I became secretary if you increased the risk of their being punished and sent to prison, they might be likely to think again. Tony Blair, who shadowed me when I was then secretary, really changed the attitude of the Labour Party towards criminal justice policy and they followed the example which I like to think I set.

SPEAKER (27:59): These men and women are in a career as secure and promising as any in the country. Good pay, good promotion prospects, a steady requirement for prisons and prison officers. In the next few years many more prison establishments will be on string.

DANNY DORLING (28:10): We ended up by the end of the Thatcher period having the largest prison population in Europe and this is an industry.

LYN MATTHEWS (28:40): If you have got a privatisation of prison services then obviously you are going to make profit out of that.

MARGARET THATCHER (28:24) – We privatised industry after industry. Government ought not to control business. It doesn't know how to do it. It interferes.

COLIN HAY (28:33): One privatization doesn't mean very much, but when you do privatization over a fifteen year period of time, it's very cumulatively significant in terms of where the boundaries of the public and the private sector lie.

SPEAKER (28:43): With just a few months to go before Britain's water industry is sold off in the stock exchange, today's announcement is intended to give the consumer, the city, and the water companies a breakdown of what it is all going to cost and who will have to foot the bill. The extra costs are aimed at improving standards, as well as making private companies more attractive to the city.

FEMALE SPEAKER (29:06): There is no doubt that the consumer is paying for privatization and I think this is a clear case of the consumer having to pay unnecessary charges simply to move the industry from one sector to the other.

MALE SPEAKER (29:16): These improvements will be achieved at lower cost with the industry and the private sector than would have been the case had it stayed in the public sector, if indeed we would have seen any improvements at all it it would have remained a nationalized industry.

PAUL DESSON (29:29): There was a time when we owned the water. We owned the gas, we owned the electricity. It was all publicly owned assets, and Margaret Thatcher just sold them off for a song.

SPEAKER (29:41): Criticism from many sides then, for the Prime Minister, but her views on the economy remain unshaken.

POLITICIAN (29:48): A thriving financial sector is, of course, crucial to the success of any free enterprise economy. No one here tonight needs reminding that the big bang is only the beginning.

SPEAKER (30:03): It was as if money was being reinvented. The big bang meant, for the first time, foreigners and institutions could join the stock exchange. Dealers could buy and sell as market makers on their own behalf. Technology became king.

FINANCE INTERVIEWEE (30:21): The big bang really represented the largest revolution that any sophisticated financial market has probably undergone at one time.

SPEAKER (30:30): From being an exclusive cartel, almost a gentleman's club, the city turned overnight into a competitive open market.

FINANCE INTERVIEWEE (30:35): It's a tremendously important change and one that everyone should welcome.

SPEAKER (30:53): Margaret Thatcher laid the foundations of the prosperity that the city enjoys today. It is she who went for the big bang in 1986 and restored London to its Victorian imminence as the financial capital of the world.

SPEAKER (31:13): But politicians like nothing more than to fight a general election. Britain's parliamentarians are no different. The announcement that the countries electors were going to the polls on June the 11th was fairly low key. Britain's statements awaited journalists, but it ended months of speculation.

MARGARET THATCHER (31:28): The more we have been preparing for the manifesto, the more I have realized there is still more to do. Indeed, it might take more than one further term to do it.

COLIN HAY (31:36): It is relatively unusual in British politics to have a government to have a government in power for such a long period of time, and a cumulative consequence of that is in fact very significant.

SPEAKER (31:45): In Britain, another example of political endurance as Mrs Thatcher celebrated her election to an historic third term in her election in July.

SPEAKER (31:55): The 1987 election marked a high point for what Tories were now happy to call Thatcherism. Mrs. Thatcher had altered the political map and Labour could not deny it. Emboldened by her victory, Mrs Thatcher pressed on with more privatizations and more radical changes in education and health.

DANNY DORLING (32:15): They privatized a huge amount of things, but they also made the idea of privatisation acceptable. It became normal, so when Labour came in in 1997, they began to privatise parts of the health service without that much opposition because she changed the underlying beliefs about what was okay and what was sensible.

COLIN HAY (32:33): The Thatcher governments effectively changed the center of politics, and Labour under Blair came to meet them on that new middle ground.

TONY BLAIR (32:40): Now it's true we changed our image and we created a professional organization, but I tell you something else that is true. If I stood in 1997 on the policies of 1987 I would have lost.

BARONESS LISTER OF BURTESETT (32:50): She had herself, I think, said that her biggest achievement was New Labour.

TONY BLAIR (32:57): And this New Labour government will govern in the interests of all our people the whole of this nation. That I can promise you.

TONY BLAIR (33:06): In a way, I always thought my job was to build on some of the things that she had done rather than reverse them.

MARGARET THATCHER (33:14): To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase u-turn, I have only one thing to say: U-turn (You turn) if you want to. The ladies not for turning.

MARGARET THATCHER (33:34): There is no such thing as political murder or political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing, and criminal violence.

MARGARET THATCHER (33:46): It is an opportunity to affirm anew the deep friendships not only between ourselves, but between the British and American peoples.

MARGARET THATCHER (33:57): And it is much, much more one world. We all got the same problems, and Thatcherism is applying the world over.

MARGARET THATCHER (34:04): Yes, people do know where they stand with us. Yes, they do know we are a strong government. Yes, I hope to go on and on.

COLIN HAY (34:16): To understand where the British commonwealth is today, and to understand the global financial crisis, I think we need to understand that kind of liberalizing market disposition of the Thatcher grammar.

JOHN HILLS (34:27): The idea that it was okay for people in the city to be making serious money, I think was a change for what many people thought was appropriate behaviour in the past.

DANNY DORLING (34:41): The long-term effect of it was to result in the crash of 2007-2008 because we had an incredibly unregulated and dangerous financial sector which was making so much money that even the Labour government thought that the trickle down from the rich could help finance everything else.

SPEAKER (35:01): In September, America's key lending bank Lehman Brothers became the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history. In Europe, lending banks Northern Rock and Dexia needed emergency government intervention to prop them up.

GORDON BROWN (35:13): What we are trying to do is navigate the economy, steer it through what had been very difficult times.

FINANCE INTERVIEWEE (35:18): For Wall Street, this is the worst crisis they had faced since the Great Depression.

FEMALE REPORTER (35:21): While panic lingers, bankers and insurers are again looking to the state and the taxpayer to deliver them from the threat of financial disaster.

SPEAKER (35:29): The Bank of England can supply more liquidity to the market for longer periods against a wider range of collateral.

BORIS JOHNSON (35:39): After the crash of 2008, we all waited for the paradigm shift. The left was ushered centre stage and missed their cue. Political history reached a turning point and failed to turn.

MARGARET THATCHER (36:04): There are things for which we as a people have stood for for centuries, and by giving voice to these convictions in 1979 by holding fast to them for four years. By having them reaffirmed in 1983. I believe we have altered the whole course of British politics for at least a generation.

BORIS JOHNSON (36:29): She put a stop to the talk of decline and she made it possible for people to talk without the slightest embarrassment about putting the Great back into Britain where there was no shame, quite the reverse, in getting rich.

SPEAKER (36:48): The hegemony of the Right in politics is not overturned sadly, by thirteen years of Labour Goodman.

SPEAKER (37:00): We still tend to believe Thatcherism. It is the underlying ethos of our times. All three of our main political parties are essentially Thatcherite parties now.

MARGARET THATCHER (37:12): Thatcherism is much older than me. It is based on fundamental common sense and limitation of the powers of government and handing more and more powers and the fruits of their work back to people, and it works.

LYN MATTHEWS (37:24): Everything that Thatcher did was a way of someone to make money out of. It didn't matter whether that money was actually coming from the poor and they were suffering.

ALAN WALKER (37:39): It was the sense in which people felt that she had been too successful in the strategy of inequality and that British society had lost something important like a sense of fairness or a sense of justice.

SPEAKER (37:53): Do you not see a nation divided deeply now between north and south, between the prosperous suburbs and the inner-cities, between the employed and the unemployed, between the poverty stricken millions and the whiz kids of the big bang in the city?

MARGARET THATCHER (38:09): I do not see a nation divided in anything like the terms that you say or even divided in that way.

SPEAKER (38:19): There are people who for twenty-five years told people, “We must need to fear the markets, we must deregulate and privatize everything”, and what happened after the crash is, it completely turned around for ten trillion euros into the banking system in the world, as a complete handout to the wealthy.

PROTESTOR (38:37): They are totally detached from ordinary, everyday people.

LYN MATTHEWS (38:41): They see what they see and they just see wealth, privilege, and power.

INTERVIEWEE (38:46): Society does things. Things happen because of inequality.

BORIS JOHNSON (38:49): I don't believe that economic policy is possible. Indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of anybody keeping up with the Joneses. That is a valuable spur to economic activity.

LYN MATTHEWS (39:09): It is all about me, me, me—not caring about other people. That is the legacy of Thatcher.

BARON HOWARD OF LYMPNE (39:17): I think she saved Britain. I think she did the peacetime equivalent of what Winston Churchill did in 1940.

BARONESS LISTER OF BURTESETT (39:29): I think we ought to remember her as probably the most divisive Prime Minister this country has known and hugely damaging in terms of the fabric of our society.

ACTIVIST (39:44): She is still in power through David Cameron and Tony Blair -- through all of those people who carry on her legacy. She lives forever in this country now. We can not get rid of her, and so we have a revolution.

MARGARET THATCHER (40:00): Ideas can move mountains, and they can bring about whole changes in the attitudes, and in the moment, it is the ideas of our party and our beliefs which are changing the world.

Generation Right video

Back to Thatcherism and crime