Margaret Thatcher | Strikes, Bombs, & Selling the Silver | 3
Legacy
Wondery
3.9 • 696 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Conflict is never far from Thatcher's politics - and life. She becomes locked in a year long bitter stand off with miners on strike over her planned closures. She doesn't give in either to the IRA. If anything - after surviving a near-miss assassination attempt, she is more resolute than ever in seeing through the changes she believes the country needs.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Legacy and the third episode of our series on Margaret Thatcher. |
| 0:10.0 | We left you in the last episode with Thatcher having won a landslide re-election victory |
| 0:15.3 | in the 1983 election against Labour's Michael Foote. She won by a majority of 144 seats. And one of the factors |
| 0:23.8 | that saw her win that victory was the outcome of the Falklands War a year before, in which she had |
| 0:29.4 | been able to hold herself out as a war hero in the tradition of Winston Churchill. And another |
| 0:34.5 | being the economy, which at this point has been improving and gradually beginning to bring benefits, especially to the middle classes. |
| 0:43.4 | Her re-election means she now has the power to shape the cabinet more to her liking. |
| 0:48.3 | Frances Pym is sacked as Foreign Secretary, Nigel Lawson, a convinced monetarist like her, is now Chancellor of the Exchequer. |
| 0:55.3 | And the press give her unstinting support, unlike that of any other Prime Minister in the modern era. |
| 1:01.4 | Everything's looking great for her Thatcher. So now she thinks it's time to take on the unions, |
| 1:06.7 | which she thinks has been what's been damaging Britain for more than a decade. And this is the |
| 1:12.0 | clash for which she's going to be most remembered, and it will cement her legacy as probably the |
| 1:16.5 | most divisive Prime Minister of the post-war period. |
| 1:33.3 | For Wondery and Gollhanger, I'm Peter Frankopern. |
| 1:34.4 | I'm Afwa Hirsch. |
| 1:42.8 | And this is Legacy, the show that tells the lives of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived, and asks if they have the reputation that they deserve. |
| 2:09.5 | This is Thatcher, Episode 3, Strikes, Bombs and Selling the silver. As part of Thatcher's economic revolution for Britain, she wants to close industries and factories |
| 2:14.7 | that are no longer fit for purpose. This could mean hundreds of thousands of job |
| 2:20.1 | losses. The problem for Thatcher is that these industries aren't going to close without a fight. |
| 2:27.1 | I think one thing we can agree on, Peter, is that Thatcher's hatred for the unions was genuine. Deep-seated. I think it's hard to think back |
| 2:37.9 | now about what the Cold War meant and the two very different political visions and economic |
| 2:42.6 | visions of what a state looked like. On the one hand, you had the Soviet Union and the communist |
... |
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