Margaret Thatcher

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Maggie Thatcher started the Falklands.

Um, Bush started Iran.

Bush did start Iran, didn't he?

And that sclerosis, that hardening of the technologies, really we can trace to a set of decisions in the 70s when all around the world you had what they sometimes called the neoliberal era.

Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan in Canada where I'm from.

We had Brian Mulroney who was kind of a Reagan-lite era.

And they decided that even though for a century we had this robust culture of competition enforcement where we just said we shouldn't allow monopolies, we shouldn't allow companies to get too powerful, even if they were good at their jobs, even if they never abused that power, they could.

So thank you very much for all of your support.

Jack Chambers and Margaret Thatcher are not two people I'd have put in the same sentence, Sarah, but apparently some of his Fianna Fáil colleagues are now doing it.

There was a piece in the Irish Examiner this week from Fianna Fáil ministers complaining, complaining that basically he's being too stingy with the money, that he's not handing them over enough cash for the budget.

And one of them, apparently, this is the Irish Examiner reporting this now, has described him as Jack Thatcher.

I think that comparison is very unfair to Jack Chambers, but horrendously unfair to poor Margaret Thatcher.

Well, you would.

think that this is the kind of thing which we had a conversation was the last podcast or the podcast before I think it was last week about government spending and we were complaining about the potential disaster and the government spending being out of control and I think this is a small um insight into what kind of pressure you're put in by the sort of chicken and chips brigade of your government colleagues who want this that and the other for their own departments or their own constituencies and they don't want to hear about budget restraints or whatever because it's all about the bottom line for them the bottom line being keep the voter happy keep the voter happy keep the voter happy If I was going to be really cynical and really suspicious and a conspiracy theorist, I would say that if I was in an advisory role to somebody like Jack Chambers, I'd release that story myself about him when it wasn't true so that it was on the record later.

And that's what they think the fucking job is.

So a really paradoxical position where supposedly timeless things are manufactured in real time.

This was a profoundly important idea And was one of Hobsbawm's contributions also to making sense of contemporary realities in Britain, because one of the common diagnoses of Margaret Thatcher, after all, was that in the 80s and 90s, she was taking Britain back to Victorian values.

And Britain was reconfiguring itself as a site of heritage and the heritage industry.

And history was becoming a business, effectively, one from which Hobsbawm, after all, also profited handsomely.

Neil Kinnock is his hero.

He still thinks Margaret Thatcher, a woman who became prime minister before I, a 46-year-old, was born.

she's the root of all the problems and i want people to understand that this is what we're dealing with this is old school labor they're going to tax tax tax they're going to blow all the money on welfare it is pure socialism they're going to run out of our money

Kimmy Bate not speaking with me yesterday.

But even that was controversial at the time because it didn't please certain people in the State Department in those days, because they saw this as interference in the affairs of a foreign government.

Encouraged by Speaker Tip O'Neill, a great Irish American, um, family came from Donegal, um, Ronald Reagan helped persuade Margaret Thatcher to agree to the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985.

Um, Bill Clinton, when he was candidate for the presidency, played, uh, made commitments to get involved in trying to promote peace in Northern Ireland.

And I remember when I was in Belfast in those final days before the agreement was reached, the word would go around that the White House is on the phone, which meant that the most powerful man in the world was picking up the phone in Washington in his busy day and phoning provincial politicians in Northern Ireland, urging them to, to go the final mile for peace.

In an analytical essay for the Buenos Aires Herald written in English, journalist Martina Haragat-Gui unpacks The Sudden Turn in Government Rhetoric in Regards to the Malvinas Islands.

Titled, Millais' History with Malvinas, From Admiring Thatcher to Defending Sovereignty, the article traces how the president shifted from vocal praise for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and talk of respecting islander self-determination to adopting staunchly nationalistic defense policies.

She suggests... that dropping poll numbers ahead of the 2027 presidential elections encouraged this change, reviving a cause that historically unites Argentines across political divisions.

To read the full piece, check out the link in the show notes.

Well, it's changed a lot in the last couple of weeks.

Previously, the current president of Argentina, Javier Millay, who's a kind of right-wing reformist, and he's a big fan of Margaret Thatcher, who was obviously prime minister of the UK during the Falklands War in 1982.

Millay is a big fan of her, a big fan of kind of warming up relations with London, which have kind of been very up and down over the last few decades since that conflict.

um malay had tried to kind of start lots of new dialogue with london um not about kind of well not from from the british perspective not about giving the falcons to argentina but you know improving cooperation on a lot of things while both countries can kind of maintain their um their position that they are um they have sovereignty over the islands um but then in the last few weeks malay has um taken a pretty sharp turn he came out with a kind of surprise televised address to the nation, basically saying we're going to really ramp up our claim to the islands.

A quarter of a century later, it's at more than 52,000.

The world lost many historical figures since the September 11th attacks, including Michael Jackson, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Antonin Scalia, Prince, George H.W. Bush, Steve Jobs, John McCain, Muhammad Ali, Kobe Bryant, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Bowie.

Scientists discovered gravitational waves and the Higgs boson, recorded the first images of a black hole, and pioneered the field of gene editing.

We collectively as a human race lived through the coronavirus pandemic, which killed more than 6.8 million people around the world, according to the final data collected by the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.