Free Republic

The collapse of communism: Reagan, Thatcher and the pope By Joseph A. Cannon Deseret News Published: Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009 12:12 a.m. MST Twenty years ago, my wife, Jan, and I were in what was then called West Berlin for a conference. One pleasant afternoon we walked along the Berlin Wall from the Brandenburg Gate to Checkpoint Charlie. During that time, there were significant rancorous anti-Communist demonstrations in East Germany, primarily in the southern part. A German friend, with typical Prussian hubris, dismissed them. "Nothing will come of this, these are just the ineffective rumblings of a bunch of Bavarians."...

I would like to extend warm birthday wishes to Margaret Thatcher today. Baroness Thatcher continues to remain a role model to many people, particularly women, around the world. Her career is a collection of "firsts." She was the youngest female Conservative Party member to stand for election in history, she was the first woman to hold the title Leader of the Opposition, and she was the first woman to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. As Prime Minister, she took an active role in defending economic freedom and democratic ideals. Her push to privatize British industry and lower tax...

A former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher says the real purpose of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on Dec. 7-18 is to use global warming hype as a pretext to lay the foundation for a one-world government. "At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed," Monkton told a Minnesota Free Market Institute audience on Thursday at Bethel University in St. Paul. "Your president will sign it. Most of the Third World countries will sign it, because they think they're going to get money...

I would like to extend warm birthday wishes to Margaret Thatcher today. Baroness Thatcher continues to remain a role model to many people, particularly women, around the world. Her career is a collection of "firsts." She was the youngest female Conservative Party member to stand for election in history, she was the first woman to hold the title Leader of the Opposition, and she was the first woman to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. As Prime Minister, she took an active role in defending economic freedom and democratic ideals. Her push to privatize British industry and lower tax...

The paper, Women in Power: Milestones, listed 28 of the most significant events between 1907 and 2008 involving women on the political stage. The milestones included the election of the first female Head of Government – Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in 1960 and Britain's first woman councillor Reina Emily Lawrence in 1907. The document, produced by the Equality Office which is run by Miss Harman, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, highlights the role of Nancy Astor who was the first woman to take her seat in parliament in 1919, the election of Dianne Abbott...

Documents published last week highlight the former prime minister's concern that the fall of the Berlin Wall could be a risk to Britain's national security. "We do not want a united Germany," Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev at a lunch meeting in the Kremlin in September 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. "This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the whole international situation and could endanger our security." Among the 1,000 transcripts of Politburo and other high-level papers smuggled out of Russia by...

I’ve always wondered why liberals were fascinated with the gap between rich and poor as a measure of prosperity. On its face, such a measure is nothing more than comparing apples to oranges. Every logical person knows that a more accurate method of measuring prosperity within an income bracket is to compare that income bracket’s situation at a point in the past with that same income bracket’s situation in the present. Focusing on what someone else has says nothing of one’s own situation. Margaret Thatcher always knew that.

Lady Thatcher faces several more days in hospital after an operation on her broken arm. Her son Sir Mark visited her today and said she had had a good night but would be likely to remain in London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital longer than expected. Sir Mark said yesterday that Lady Thatcher, 83, was likely to remain in hospital until at least Wednesday. Today he revised that estimate to say it was likely to be longer before she is allowed home. A spokesman for Lady Thatcher described her condition as "comfortable" and said she was resting today. The operation inserted...

THIRTY years after Britain's notorious winter of discontent, it has become clear that the election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government not only ended a long period of Labour rule but also defeated the Left's attempt, led from the trade unions, to transfigure British parliamentary democracy into a form of Soviet state. The leading figure in this story was the general secretary of Britain's largest union, the Transport and General Workers Union, and chairman of the Trades Union Congress's international committee, Jack Jones. In 1977, more than half the respondents to a Gallup poll named him the most powerful man in...

Baroness Thatcher has spent the night in hospital after breaking her arm in a fall. The former Conservative Prime Minister tripped in her bedroom at home in London this morning, fracturing a bone near her shoulder. Doctors decided to keep Lady Thatcher overnight at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital as a precaution. Friends said the former leader - dubbed the Iron Lady for her steely determination - was 'very lucky' to escape more serious injury. 'She tripped over at home this morning and has broken a bone in her upper arm,' Lady Thatcher's official spokeswoman said. 'It's a simple fracture,...

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is recovering after breaking her arm in a fall. Thatcher's office said the 83-year-old politician fractured a bone in her upper arm after tripping at home early Friday.

Margaret Thatcher in St. Peter's Square May 27. (Reuters/Alessia Pierdomenico) Margaret Thatcher met Pope Benedict XVI at the end of his weekly general audience today. The 83-year-old former British prime minister, who led the country from 1979 to 1990, had earlier in the day laid flowers at the tomb of John Paul II. An Anglican, it was Baroness Thatcher’s second visit to the Vatican in less than two years, leading some to speculate whether she is thinking of joining the Church. During her previous trip, she also visited John Paul II’s tomb to pay her respects. According to those who...

The former Prime Minister is flying to Italy on Frdiay to stay with Carla Powell whose husband Charles was her foreign policy adviser at Downing Street. Lady Powell, who lives in a villa on the outskirts of Rome, arranged the meeting with Pope Benedict XVI which will take place in the Vatican on Wednesday. The meeting will come more than 30 years after Lady Thatcher first travelled to the Vatican, as Leader of the Opposition, to meet Pope Paul VI. In November 1980 she met Pope John Paul II, the former Polish Cardinal, who agreed to put pressure on the...

Within hours of Michael Martin's announcement that he intended to step down as Speaker of the House of Commons, the Queen was seeking the counsel of Baroness Thatcher on the issue. "Isn't it extraordinary about the Speaker?" Her Majesty told the former prime minister when they met at a garden party at the The Goring Hotel, near Buckingham Palace, on Tuesday evening. Showing her customary grasp of history, she added: "This is the first time it has happened since 1695." Lady Thatcher, in a pink ensemble, responded: "Quite extraordinary, but I think it was the right thing to do. The...

If you listen to liberals, they are the "reality-based" people. They contrast themselves to conservatives, who they claim are ideology-based or faith-based. "The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact." Barack Obama "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." Stephen Colbert "The facts of life are conservative." Margaret Thatcher I offer here several pieces of evidence, large and small. You can be the judge of who is right, Stephen Colbert or Maggie Thatcher. Eco-Warriors "A lot of environmental messages are simply not accurate. But that's the way we sell messages in this society. We use hype. And...

Everyone wants to be immortal. Few are. Margaret Thatcher is. Why? Because her values are timeless, eternal. Tap anyone on the shoulder anywhere in the world, and ask what Mrs Thatcher believed in, and they will tell you. They can give a clear answer to what she “stood for”. How did she do it? Lady Thatcher knew that in politics, as in law, the jury seeks motive and intent. This is why she told Philip Larkin that her favourite line of his poetry was: “Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.”On the day of her election victory,...

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION Steyn on Britain and Europe Sunday, 03 May 2009 Just after the Fall of Thatcher, I was in the pub enjoying a drink with her daughter Carol after a little light radio work. A fellow patron, a "radical" "poet", decided to have a go at her in loco parentis, which is Latin for "in the absence of her loco parent". After reciting a long catalogue of Mrs Thatcher's various crimes, he leant into Carol, nose to nose, and summed it all up: "Basically, your mum just totally smashed the working classes." Carol was a jolly good sport...

Thirty years ago, Britain embarked upon a conservative revolution that not only transformed the country but left an indelible and unmistakable impact on the rest of the world. Only two British Prime Ministers--Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher--have by force of personality and power of example done anything like this.In The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote of his initial thoughts after his election as Prime Minister in May 1940: As I went to bed at about 3 a.m., I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I...

We’re still in the first 100 days of the joyous observances of Barack Obama’s first 100 days, and many weeks of celebration lie ahead, so here are my thoughts: President Obama’s strongest talent is not his speechifying, which is frankly a bit of a snoozeroo. In Europe, he left ‘em wanting less pretty much every time (headline from Britain’s Daily Telegraph: “Barack Obama really does go on a bit”). That uptilted chin combined with the left-right teleprompter neck swivel you can set your watch by makes him look like an emaciated Mussolini umpiring an endless rally of high lobs on...

The video, located here, is an inspirational video for all conservatives.

      May 1, 2009 A Tribute to Margaret Thatcher--30 Years On  by Robin Harris, D. Phil. WebMemo #2419 Thirty years ago, Britain embarked upon a conservative revolution that not only transformed the country but left an indelible and unmistakable impact on the rest of the world. Only two British Prime Ministers--Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher--have by force of personality and power of example done anything like this.In The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote of his initial thoughts after his election as Prime Minister in May 1940: As I went to bed at about 3 a.m., I was...

In a [1] story in the Sunday Times of London, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, a leading spokesman for liberal economics, says this about the Obama budget: It is the boldest budget we have seen since the Reagan administration, and drives a nail in the coffin of Reaganomics. We can basically say goodbye to the philosophy espoused by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There is no question that President Obama’s budget, and his economic plans more broadly, are an effort to drive a nail through the philosophy espoused by Reagan and Thatcher. And so it’s worth asking: What exactly...

Never before seen memos about an unknown Tory politician called Margaret Thatcher, which singled her out for prominence because she was "very pretty" and dressed attractively, have been unearthed in the BBC archive. The collection of documents also include a series of long forgotten television and radio interviews with Baroness Thatcher which charts her gradual transformation from suburban housewife to a major player on the world stage as the Iron Lady by the end of the 1970s. It includes an interview in which as Education Secretary she talks about her make-up routine, why she would never wear jeans, how she...

Carol Thatcher has hit back over her 'Golli-gate' sacking and compared Britain with communist East Germany. She refused to apologise for calling a French tennis player a 'golliwog' and claimed people were 'far too easily offended in modern society'. 'Ironically, it's like we're back 20 years ago before the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany,' she told Channel 5's The Wright Stuff.

"33 Minutes: Protecting America in the New Missile Age" is a high-definition documentary that tells the story of the very real threat that hostile nations and rogue dictators now pose to every one of us. ### The Significance of 33 Minutes A ballistic missile from a foreign enemy would take 33 minutes to reach the United States. With each passing day, this becomes a growing danger to America, yet our government has failed to build the missile defense systems capable of defending us against such attacks. Our enemies are attempting to stockpile arsenals that threaten our freedom and prosperity. North...

With today's economy, wouldn't it be nice if we knew how to make an economy grow? To know what works and what doesn't? Well, we do. We just prefer to ignore the truth.What works is economic freedom. What doesn't work is more government. I'm sorry that those words sound simplistic and like Republican "ideology" (or at least what used to be Republican ideology - before the Bailout Fairy arrived). But they have the benefit of being true. If you were to start from scratch, ignoring all ideology and going simply by the evidence of what produces prosperity, you would come...

Carol Thatcher, the daughter of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is facing a possible ban from the BBC after referring to a tennis player as “a golliwog”. The BBC told The Times last night that it had held urgent talks with Thatcher, 55, and was seeking a formal apology before it agreed to allow her to reappear on the network as either a contributor or presenter.

Left-winger Derek Hatton has made an astonishing attack on Baroness Thatcher, saying it was a 'shame' she had ever been born. The former deputy leader of Liverpool Council criticised the former Prime Minister's mother for 'not believing in abortion'. Mr Hatton, expelled from the Labour Party by Neil Kinnock in 1986 for being in Militant Tendency, made his comments in an interview in Cyprus, where he runs a property company He was asked if he had 'warmed' to 84-year-old Lady Thatcher now that she is an 'old lady'. 'The only problem I've got with her, with her mother, is that...

As her special adviser in Downing Street, he played a vital role in two of the most important episodes of her premiership. In 1981 he was brought back from academia to stiffen her resolve in pushing though a budget that cut public spending during a recession, the decisive break with the Keynesian past.

Professor Sir Alan Walters, the former economics adviser to ex-PM Margaret Thatcher whose controversial role led to the resignation of chancellor Nigel Lawson, has died at the age of 82. Sir Alan was described as "the finest of friends" by Baroness Thatcher, who paid tribute to him as "radical, fearless, consistent and creative". He had reportedly been suffering from Parkinson's Disease and his health had deteriorated before Christmas. He and his wife Paddie celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary on December 27. In a statement, Baroness Thatcher said: "Alan Walters was the best economic adviser any Prime Minister ever had -...

Being listed in fourth place for Time magazine's "Person of the Year," as Sarah Palin was for 2008, sounds a little like being awarded the Order of Purity (Fourth Class). But it testifies to something important. Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular -- namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is "no Margaret Thatcher." Very...

"Keynsianism is proof you shouldn't 'leave economics to economists..."

Conservatives of a fatalistic bent -- their numbers this month have swollen -- like to depress themselves with the maxim that government programs never perish. Statism's relentless march can be checked at times but rarely beaten back. Just look, they say, at those New Deal relics known as farm programs. And then they see Time magazine's cover this week -- Barack Obama pictured as FDR, with the cover line "The New New Deal" -- and they head for the window ledge. [snip] But the greatest refutation of their dour outlook can be expressed in a single name: Margaret Thatcher. When...

She may no longer make speeches, on doctor's orders, but there is no keeping Lady Thatcher away from her public. From the moment she clambered shakily from the back seat of a black Jaguar, on to the forecourt of the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, this was going to be her night. At 83, and reportedly suffering from dementia, she makes few public appearances these days. But this was a special occasion - the 20th anniversary dinner of the Bruges Group, which takes its name from a speech in which she first warned against the creation of a European "super state"....

Thursday, 2pm - AN Iron Age coin depicting a warrior leader bearing an uncanny likeness to Grantham-born former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has been found just a few miles from her birth place. Metal detectorist David Baker was searching a muddy field near Grantham when he uncovered the 2,000-year-old silver coin. On one side was the head of a tribal leader or goddess that looked just like Margaret Thatcher. On its reverse was a celtic armed war horse - imagery associated with Lady Thatcher during her 1980s pomp. David, 40, said: "I'd gone out detecting for the day to get...

For a decade, Tom DeLay ruthlessly enforced Republican rule in Washington with such vigour that he was nicknamed "The Hammer". But the party's former leader in the House of Representatives will this month launch a national grassroots movement to combat the liberal activists who he believes outfoxed and outmanoeuvred Republicans to win the 2006 mid-term elections. Mr DeLay, who revelled in his reputation as a no-holds-barred Washington operator as the party's chief whip and then majority leader from 1995 to 2005, aims to instil an army of conservatives across the country with his political street-fighting skills. Tom DeLay: 'I have...

Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Baroness Thatcher have attended a commemoration in London for people who served in Northern Ireland during a military campaign which lasted for almost 40 years....

The 1979 UK general election was the first I followed with the attention of an adult voter. One thing I recall clearly was a certainty within the British media that the Tory election campaign would run aground through the agency of something called 'Maggie's Gaffe'. They waited and speculated endlessly and, of course, in the end it never came. That's come back to me more than once during the frenzy since last Friday to find something nasty in the Alaskan woodshed that would somehow knock Ms Palin out of the race. Whatever they find, it will need to be a...

Oh boy. I don't know what is going to happen next in the Sarah Palin story, but one thing is now for sure: John McCain has picked an Alaskan Margaret Thatcher to be his running mate. She spoke for 36 pugnacious, stilleto-heeled, in your face, Barack Obama is a limp-wristed cover boy minutes. She blew the roof off. Sarah Palin has now shaken up a presidential race like no other nominee in modern times. She took to the stage to the back-drop of a breaking National Enquirer story, flatly denied in a press release by the John McCain campaign, that...

Thatcher quotes: "If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing." "My job is to stop Britain going red." "Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean—power over people, power to the State." "To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects." "My policies are based not on some...

There are few sights more bloodcurdling than the liberal pack in full cry. The viciousness of the attacks on Sarah Palin is a testimony to the degree of panic her appointment has generated in Leftist circles. It would seem that it is only sexist to trash a woman candidate if she is a Woman Candidate, which is to say a liberal. .......... Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a "grocer's daughter" by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded...

LONDON, Aug. 25 -- The daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher said Britain's "Iron Lady" is suffering from dementia, the family's first public confirmation of what has been widely rumored in Britain for several years. Thatcher's condition has deteriorated so much that she forgets that her husband, Denis Thatcher, died in 2003, her daughter said in a memoir that is to be published next month and was serialized over the weekend in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. "I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again," Carol Thatcher wrote. "Every time it finally sank in...

The daughter of British former prime minister Margaret Thatcher tells how her mother's dementia has left her struggling to remember the simplest facts in book extracts published Sunday. Carol Thatcher wrote that, on her worst days, her mother struggles to finish sentences but shows occasional glimpses of her old self, particularly when talking about her time in Downing Street. "I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100 percent cast-iron damage-proof," Carol Thatcher wrote in her memoir, "A Swim-On Part In The Goldfish Bowl", which was serialised in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. "Whereas previously you never had...

[note: You won't read this in five minutes] Nile Gardiner, Ph.D.: Good morning. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and the fifth Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture.The Margaret Thatcher Lecture series began in Sep­tember 2006, with a major speech by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky on the subject, "Is Free­dom for Everyone?" It was followed by lectures on economic freedom and religious freedom by Hernan­do de Soto and Michael Novak, and by Ambassador John Bolton's lecture "Does the United Nations Advance the Cause of Freedom?"Our distinguished speaker today is Victor Davis Han­son, who will address the theme, "In Defense of Liberty: The...

When Lady Thatcher revived the British economy, she was reviving profound social virtues that the British had once exemplified to the world—the Thatcherite “vigorous virtues” described above. In 1979, they seemed utterly destroyed by 50 years of statism and socialism. In fact, they had merely been driven underground by government over-regulation and intervention. As James C. Bennett has observed, it took only a few years of Lady Thatcher’s application of free market solutions for these virtues to become vigorous again. Once that happened, it took only a few more years for those revived virtues to transform Britain from the sick...

IT IS A great pleasure to be back at Hillsdale. It is some 32 years since I first visited the College for a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Those few days were an important education in American politics for me. The conference was attended by many people who had just returned from the Republican Convention at which President Ford had narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan. They were full of enthusiasm for Reagan and full of conviction that one day he would become president. Their enthusiasm—and their passion too for sound doctrine—swept me along. I think I became a firm Reaganite...

Reagan and Thatcher sincerely liked each other and shared almost identical political views. There was no real gulf between them, like Roosevelt's suspicion of a British Empire that Churchill had pledged not to dissolve. Their joint policies led to a victory in the Cold War that was more complete and less morally uncomfortable than Yalta's division of Europe into a continent half-free and half-slave. When Soviet communism collapsed along with the Berlin Wall 10 months after Reagan left office, his penpal was generously quick to give him credit: Reagan had won the Cold War, she said, "without firing a shot"....

Margaret Thatcher: The patriot who vanquished failure Last Updated: 12:02am BST 11/04/2008 After decades of decline, Margaret Thatcher's leadership brought courage and conviction to a nation that had grown used to second best, says Charles Moore On the day in 1982 that the British task force set sail to recover the Falkland Islands from the Argentine invaders, Margaret Thatcher was asked on television: "If you fail, would you feel obliged to resign?" "Failure?" she answered, "Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? 'Failure - the possibilities do not exist'." The remark goes to the heart of Mrs Thatcher's essential...

Local law enforcement sources were sceptical, yet cautious yesterday about a report alleging a Russian mafia plot to kidnap Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Sir Mark is currently on the Rock amid speculation that authorities in Equatorial Guinea will issue an international warrant for his arrest in connection with a failed coup in 2004. In a further twist to an already bizarre tale, a specialist US newsletter claimed the British secret intelligence agency MI6 had warned Sir Mark that a powerful Russian criminal organisation had offered to kidnap him and take him...