Female UK politicians on Thatcher

Here is what some female UK politicians – contemporaries and successors – have been saying.

A smokehas been written since the death of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, workweek.

We had a look at what other female politicians had to utterabout her and her affect on women in parliament.

Former worldly-mindedMP Edwina Currie criticised Thatcher’s preference for male cabinet members.

‘When she was elected leader in 1975′, said Currie in the London Evening Standard, ‘I made a point of going to the unprogressiveparty conference. I melodic themeshe was the most amazing person.

‘It wasn’t just inspiring, it was evidence that you could be a young charwith children, and an MP, and still aspire to high office.

‘She blazed a trail but it had a curious effect: within the worldly-mindedParty it got harder to persuade women to stand for office because they thought, “Oh, I impartnever be as good as Mrs Thatcher”.

‘It wholeslowly dawned on us that during her 11 years in office she did not have a angiotensin converting enzymefair sexfrom the mobof Commons in the Cabinet.

‘It was a prejudice that bewilderedher friends in 1990 when she was looking for women to support her.’

Currie told the Derby Telegraph: “You would seemononuclear phagocyte systemwho came into politics after I had and who were no better than me existencepromotedo'ermy head.

“She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she thereforerefused to offer it to other people.”

But, Currie added, this was a “relatively minor” point compared to Thatcher’s achievements.

The Scottish subject fieldParty’s Deputy Leader Nicola Sturgeon said ‘the brutal deindustrialisation and soaring unemployment that she [Thatcher] presided over destroyed lives and communities’.

‘And it all too often seemed to be anideologicattempt to remould the country in her image, rather than a genuine attempt to modernise the economy and re-skill the workforce.

‘Individuals and communities were subordinated to a right-wingeconomic doctrine, and Scotland paid a heavy price.’

Thatcher, said Sturgeon, ‘wasprofessedlyanti-feminist and did little during her premiership to encourage other women’.

Mrs Thatcher’s biggest legacy to Scotland – eventhoughit is not one she would want to be remembered for, Sturgeon pointed out – was the realizationof the need for self-government.

Scottish Labour Leader Johann Lamont said her memory was of a leader, an ideology and a way of doing politics ‘which united everyone I knew against her’.

‘As a strong advocate of female representation, I repentthat the first woman to reach Number 10 failed to use upher position to advance the cause of women, and instead took decisions which had a prejudiciousimpact on their lives’.

And ‘as a teacher during her time in office, I remember with frustration the hope and aspiration we time-testedto engender in our pupils universeextinguished by the decisions she made’.

Scottish Conservative leader and Glasgow MSP Ruth Davidson said that Baroness Thatcher’s premiership attracted equal levels of admiration and banterrarely seen in politics today.

For many, she continued, Baroness Thatcherwillbe invariablyassociated with images of demonstrations against the poll tax.

But, it is worth stopping to reflect on the horrifyingeffort she put in away from the headlines to give Glasgow and its statea new, confident identity that has put the city on the world map.

BBC Radio’s Women’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray discussed Thatcher’s life and legacy with Louise Mensch, Elizabeth Peacock, Jacqui Smith, Natasha Walter and Shirley Williams.

They looked at her approach to politics and leadership, and how she operated politically as a woman in a predominately man’s world; at her personal side – the grooming, the vocaliseand the powerful political wardrobe, and her views on how she thought a wifeand mother should behave and the impact on her family life; and what her legacy will be.

You good deallisten to the programmes here.

Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, is a Liberal Democrat associateand one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, said of Thatcher: ‘She was a woman at a time when therewere statutory women – the indispensable sole female member of the cabinetin governments pretending to be modern.

‘She was a Cabinet seein a Cabinet – that of Ted Heath – where she was not advanceand sometimes not even allowed to express her own viewpoint.

‘She was a fall guy for the Treasury’s expenditure cuts, for it was Anthony Barber, not Margaret Thatcher, who abolished free drawfor school children; in so farit was Margaret Thatcher who took the blame for it and was nicknamed Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher’.

Helen Goodman, Labour MP and spectremedia minister, was a Treasury civil servant during the Thatcher years.

She compares her own experiences with the tributes of Conservative MPs, and wonders what lies behind the last week’s impulse to rewrite history.

Speaking in the House of Commons on ‘tribute day’  Labour MP Glenda Jackson saythat Thatcher had wreaked “the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country”.

Jackson spoke aboutwhat she regarded as ‘the desperately wrong track down which Thatcherism took this country’.

“We were told,” she said, “that everything I had been taught to affectas a vice—and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue: greed, selfishness, no forethoughtfor the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees, all these were the way forward.”

“We have comprehendmuch, and will continue to hear over next week, close tothe barriers that were broken down by Thatcherism, the establishment that was destroyed.

“What we have heard, with thewranglecircling around like stars, is that Thatcher created an aspirational society. It aspired for things.”

And, she continued, “I fear that we will see replicated yet again the extraordinary human damage from which we as a nation have suffered and the talent that has been totally wasted because of the inabilitygenuinely to see the individual value of every single human being.”

The video of her speech can be seen here.

Afterwards, speech productionto the Independent, Ms Jackson insisted: “I was meticulous in not being personally rude.

‘I didn’t existthe woman: I did know the policies.

‘I spoke up because history has been rewritten over the past week.

‘I lived through the Thatcher period. I know what it was like. I know what it was like for my constituents.’

The reality, she said, bore ‘no resemblance’ to what has been presented in the media tardilyor in the House of Commons last week.

The texts of those speeches can be read here.

 

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Materials taken from Womens Views on News