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- "The key change from earlier attempts was that, for the first time in the checkered history of the Tunnel project, there was a British Prime Minister who was strongly in favour of it, and applied all the drive of her formidable personality to see it through." (en)
- "The miners' strike was the central political event of the second Thatcher Administration. Just as the victory in the Falklands War exorcised the humiliation of Suez, so the eventual defeat of the NUM etched in the public mind the end of militant trade unionism which had wrecked the economy and twice played a major part in driving elected governments from office." (en)
- "What remains to be explained is why a politician who had hitherto shown such brilliant populist sensitivity should destroy herself with a tax reform which inflicted terrible damage on millions of people who had been in the front line of the Thatcher Revolution ... Either the government failed to understand what most research and many commentators were saying, or they understand it and believed that they could, as the saying went, 'tough it out'. A third possibility is that ministers came to understand the electoral damage ahead, but were afraid to put the case strongly enough to a Prime Minister at the helm of her 'flagship'." (en)
- "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels." (en)
- "Having consulted widely among my colleagues, I have concluded that the unity of the Party and the prospects of victory in a General Election would be better served if I stood down to enable Cabinet colleagues to enter the ballot for the leadership. I should like to thank all those in Cabinet and outside who have given me such dedicated support." (en)
- "One certain beneficiary of Mrs Thatcher's radicalism has been the Labour party. She hoped to kill it, and, by 1983, it indeed seemed close to death. Instead, fear chastened it into accepting the disciplines of its new leader, Mr Neil Kinnock. True, Labour's 1983 humiliation owed much to the defection of right-wingers to form the Social Democratic party; but, in a sense, that too was her doing. Now, after years of gloomily watching her reverse the socialist 'ratchet', the Labour party has transformed itself. It has ditched unilateralism, hostility to the European Community and zeal for nationalisation. Labour as socialism is dead; as a political machine it is alive and well – and justifiably optimistic." (en)
- "Tories had always expected the switch from rates, paid by 18 million people, to a community charge, paid by 35 million, to be unpopular. Most in the party were ready to take a chance on something new, which they were told would bring high-spending Labour councils to heel by making them responsible to the voters. If it went wrong, they could always blame the councils." (en)
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