Monetarism is a tendency in economic thought that emphasizes the role of governments in controlling the amount of money in circulation. It is the view within monetary economics that variation in the money supply has major influences on national output in the short run and the price level over longer periods and that objectives of monetary policy are best met by targeting the growth rate of the money supply.

Monetarism today is mainly associated with the work of Milton Friedman, who was among the generation of economists to accept Keynesian economics and then criticize it on its own terms. Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote an influential book, ''A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960'', and argued that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." Friedman advocated a central bank policy aimed at keeping the supply and demand for money at equilibrium, as measured by growth in productivity and demand. The former head of the United States Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, is generally regarded as monetarist in his policy orientation. The European Central Bank officially bases its monetary policy on money supply targets.

Description

Monetarism is an economic theory which focuses on the macroeconomic effects of the supply of money and central banking. Formulated by Milton Friedman, it argues that excessive expansion of the money supply is inherently inflationary, and that monetary authorities should focus solely on maintaining price stability.

This theory draws its roots from two almost diametrically opposed ideas: the hard money policies that dominated monetary thinking in the late 19th century, and the monetary theories of John Maynard Keynes, who, working in the inter-war period during the failure of the restored gold standard, proposed a demand-driven model for money which was the foundation of macroeconomics. While Keynes had focused on the value stability of currency, with the resulting panics based on an insufficient money supply leading to alternate currency and collapse, then Friedman focused on price stability, which is the equilibrium between supply and demand for money.

The result was summarized in a historical analysis of monetary policy, ''Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960'', which Friedman coauthored with Anna Schwartz. The book attributed inflation to excess money supply generated by a central bank. It attributed deflationary spirals to the reverse effect of a failure of a central bank to support the money supply during a liquidity crunch.

Friedman originally proposed a fixed ''monetary rule'', called Friedman's k-percent rule, where the money supply would be calculated by known macroeconomic and financial factors, targeting a specific level or range of inflation. Under this rule, there would be no leeway for the central reserve bank as money supply increases could be determined "by a computer", and business could anticipate all monetary policy decisions.

Rise

Clark Warburton is credited with making the first solid empirical case for the monetarist interpretation of business fluctuations in a series of papers from 1945.^p. 493 Within mainstream economics, the rise of monetarism accelerated from Milton Friedman's 1956 restatement of the quantity theory of money. Friedman argued that the demand for money could be described as depending on a small number of economic variables. Thus, where the money supply expanded, people would not simply wish to hold the extra money in idle money balances; i.e., if they were in equilibrium before the increase, they were already holding money balances to suit their requirements, and thus after the increase they would have money balances surplus to their requirements. These excess money balances would therefore be spent and hence aggregate demand would rise. Similarly, if the money supply were reduced people would want to replenish their holdings of money by reducing their spending. In this, Friedman challenged a simplification attributed to Keynes suggesting that "money does not matter." Thus the word 'monetarist' was coined.

The rise of the popularity of monetarism also picked up in political circles when Keynesian economics seemed unable to explain or cure the seemingly contradictory problems of rising unemployment and inflation in response to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1972 and the oil shocks of 1973. On the one hand, higher unemployment seemed to call for Keynesian reflation, but on the other hand rising inflation seemed to call for Keynesian disinflation. The result was a significant disillusionment with Keynesian demand management: a Democratic President Jimmy Carter appointed a monetarist Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker who made inflation fighting his primary objective, and restricted the money supply (in accordance with the Friedman rule) to tame inflation in the economy. The result was the creation of the desired price stability.

Monetarists not only sought to explain present problems; they also interpreted historical ones. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their book ''A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960'' argued that the Great Depression of 1930 was caused by a massive contraction of the money supply and not by the lack of investment Keynes had argued. They also maintained that post-war inflation was caused by an over-expansion of the money supply. After Henry Hazlitt, they made famous the assertion of monetarism that 'inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon'. At first, to many economists whose perceptions had been set by Keynesian ideas, it seemed that the Keynesian vs. monetarist debate was merely about whether fiscal or monetary policy was the more effective tool of demand management. By the mid-1970s, however, the debate had moved on to more profound matters when monetarists presented a more fundamental challenge to Keynesian orthodoxy.

Many monetarists sought to resurrect the pre-Keynesian view that market economies are inherently stable in the absence of major unexpected fluctuations in the money supply. Because of this belief in the stability of free-market economies they asserted that active demand management (e.g. by the means of increasing government spending) is unnecessary and indeed likely to be harmful. The basis of this argument is an equilibrium between "stimulus" fiscal spending and future interest rates. In effect, Friedman's model argues that current fiscal spending creates as much of a drag on the economy by increased interest rates as it creates present consumption: that it has no real effect on total demand, merely that of shifting demand from the investment sector (I) to the consumer sector (C).

When Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, won the 1979 general election defeating the incumbent Labour Party led by James Callaghan, Britain had endured several years of severe inflation, which was rarely below 10% and by the time of the election in May 1979 stood at 27%. Thatcher implemented monetarism as the weapon in her battle against inflation, and succeeded at reducing it to 4% by 1983 - although this was achieved largely by the mass closure of inefficient factories, which resulted in a recession and in unemployment doubling from around 1,500,000 people to more than 3,000,000. This policy was controversial with the public and even some of her own Members of Parliament (MPs), but her success in the Falklands war led to a recovery in her popularity which, coupled with a division of the votes between opposition parties, in turn led to her Conservative party winning the 1983 general election with a substantially increased majority in spite of their share of the vote declining. This came at a time of a global recession, and Mrs Thatcher's monetarist policies earned her the respect of political leaders worldwide as Britain was a world leader in the fight against the recession and one of the first nations to re-establish economic growth.

Callaghan himself had adopted policies echoing monetarism while serving as prime minister from 1976 to 1979, adopting deflationary policies and reducing public spending in response to high inflation and national debt. He initially had some success, as inflation was below 10% by the summer of 1978, although unemployment now stood at 1,500,000. However, by the time of his election defeat barely a year later, inflation had soared to 27%.

Practice

A realistic theory should be able to explain both the deflationary waves of the late 19th Century, the Great Depression, and the stagflation period beginning with the uncoupling of exchange rates in 1972. Monetarists argue that there was no inflationary investment boom in the 1920s. Instead, monetarist thinking centers on the contraction of the M1 during the 1931-1933 period, and argues from there that the Federal Reserve could have avoided the Great Depression by moves to provide sufficient liquidity. In essence, they argue that there was an insufficient supply of money.

From their conclusion that incorrect central bank policy is at the root of large swings in inflation and price instability, monetarists argued that the primary motivation for excessive easing of central bank policy is to finance fiscal deficits by the central government. Hence, restraint of government spending is the most important single target to restrain excessive monetary growth.

With the failure of demand-driven fiscal policies to restrain inflation and produce growth in the 1970s, the way was paved for a new policy of fighting inflation through the central bank, which would be the bank's cardinal responsibility. In typical economic theory, this would be accompanied by austerity shock treatment, as is generally recommended by the International Monetary Fund: such a course was taken in the United Kingdom, where government spending was slashed in the late 70s and early 80s under the political ascendance of Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, the opposite approach was taken and real government spending increased much faster during Reagan's first four years (4.22%/year) than it did under Carter (2.55%/year).

In the ensuing short term, unemployment in both countries remained stubbornly high while central banks raised interest rates to restrain credit. These policies dramatically reduced inflation rates in both countries (the United States' inflation rate fell from almost 14% in 1980 to around 3% in 1983 ), allowing liberalization of credit and the reduction of interest rates, which lead ultimately to the inflationary economic booms of the 1980s. Arguments have been raised, however, that the fall of the inflation rate may be less from control of the money supply and more to do with the unemployment level's effect on demand; some also claim the use of credit to fuel economic expansion is itself an anti-monetarist tool, as it can be argued that an increase in money supply alone constitutes inflation.

Monetarism re-asserted itself in central bank policy in western governments at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, with a contraction both in spending and in the money supply, ending the booms experienced in the US and UK.

With the crash of 1987, questioning of the prevailing monetarist policy began. Monetarists argued that the 1987 stock market decline was simply a correction between conflicting monetary policies in the United States and Europe. Critics of this viewpoint became louder as Japan slid into a sustained deflationary spiral and the collapse of the savings-and-loan banking system in the United States pointed to larger structural changes in the economy.

In the late 1980s, Paul Volcker was succeeded by Alan Greenspan, a leading monetarist. His handling of monetary policy in the run-up to the 1991 recession was criticized from the right as being excessively tight, and costing George H. W. Bush re-election. The incoming Democratic president Bill Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan, and kept him as a core member of his economic team. Greenspan, while still fundamentally monetarist in orientation, argued that doctrinaire application of theory was insufficiently flexible for central banks to meet emerging situations.

The crucial test of this flexible response by the Federal Reserve was the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, which the Federal Reserve met by flooding the world with dollars, and organizing a bailout of Long-Term Capital Management. Some have argued that 1997-1998 represented a monetary policy bind, just as the early 1970s had represented a fiscal policy bind, and that while asset inflation had crept into the United States (which demanded that the Fed tighten the money supply), the Federal Reserve needed to ease liquidity in response to the capital flight from Asia. Greenspan himself noted this when he stated that the American stock market showed signs of irrationally high valuations.

In 2000, Alan Greenspan raised interest rates several times. These actions were believed by many to have caused the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In autumn of 2001, as a decisive reaction to the September 11 attacks and the various corporate scandals which undermined the economy, the Greenspan-led Federal Reserve initiated a series of interest rate cuts that brought the Federal Funds rate down to 1% in 2004. His critics, notably Steve Forbes, attributed the rapid rise in commodity prices and gold to Greenspan's loose monetary policy, and by late 2004 the price of gold was higher than its 12 year moving average; these same forces were also blamed for excessive asset inflation and the weakening of the dollar . These policies of Alan Greenspan are blamed by the followers of the Austrian School for creating excessive liquidity, causing lending standards to deteriorate, and resulting in the housing bubble of 2004-2006.

Currently, the American Federal Reserve follows a modified form of monetarism, where broader ranges of intervention are possible in light of temporary instabilities in market dynamics. This form does not yet have a generally accepted name.

In Europe, the European Central Bank follows a more orthodox form of monetarism, with tighter controls over inflation and spending targets as mandated by the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union under the Maastricht Treaty to support the euro. This more orthodox monetary policy followed credit easing in the late 1980s through 1990s to fund German reunification, which was blamed for the weakening of European currencies in the late 1990s.

Current state

Since 1990, the classical form of monetarism has been questioned because of events which many economists have interpreted as being inexplicable in monetarist terms, namely the unhinging of the money supply growth from inflation in the 1990s and the failure of pure monetary policy to stimulate the economy in the 2001-2003 period. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued that the 1990s decoupling was explained by a virtuous cycle of productivity and investment on one hand, and a certain degree of "irrational exuberance" in the investment sector. Economist Robert Solow of MIT suggested that the 2001-2003 failure of the expected economic recovery should be attributed not to monetary policy failure but to the breakdown in productivity growth in crucial sectors of the economy, most particularly retail trade. He noted that five sectors produced all of the productivity gains of the 1990s, and that while the growth of retail and wholesale trade produced the smallest growth, they were by far the largest sectors of the economy experiencing net increase of productivity. "2% may be peanuts, but being the single largest sector of the economy, that's an awful lot of peanuts."

There are also arguments which link monetarism and macroeconomics, and treat monetarism as a special case of Keynesian theory. The central test case over the validity of these theories would be the possibility of a liquidity trap, like that experienced by Japan. Ben Bernanke, Princeton professor and current chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has argued that monetary policy could respond to zero interest rate conditions by direct expansion of the money supply. In his words, "We have the keys to the printing press, and we are not afraid to use them." Another popular economist, Paul Krugman, has advanced the counterargument that this would have a corresponding devaluationary effect, like the sustained low interest rates of 2001-2004 produced against world currencies.

Historian David Hackett Fischer, in his study ''The Great Wave'', questioned the implicit basis of monetarism by examining long periods of secular inflation that stretched over decades. In doing so, he produced data which suggest that prior to a wave of monetary inflation, there is a wave of commodity inflation, which governments respond to, rather than lead. Whether this formulation undermines the monetary data which underpin the fundamental work of monetarism is still a matter of contention.

Monetarists of the Milton Friedman school of thought believed in the 1970s and 1980s that the growth of the money supply should be based on certain formulations related to economic growth. As such, they can be regarded as advocates of a monetary policy based on a "quantity of money" target. This can be contrasted with the monetary policy advocated by supply side economics and the Austrian School which are based on a "value of money" target (albeit from different ends of the formula). Austrian economists criticise monetarism for not recognizing the citizens' subjective value of money and trying to create an objective value through supply and demand.

These disagreements, along with the role of monetary policies in trade liberalization, international investment, and central bank policy, remain lively topics of investigation and arguments.

Gold standard

While most monetarists believe that government action is at the root of inflation, very few advocate a return to the gold standard. Friedman, for example, viewed a pure gold standard as highly impractical. For example, whereas one of the benefits of the gold standard is that the intrinsic limitations to the growth of the money supply by the use of gold or silver would prevent inflation, if the growth of population or increase in trade outpaces the money supply, there would be no way to counteract deflation and reduced liquidity (and any attendant recession) except for the mining of more gold or silver under a gold or silver standard.

Influential proponents

Karl Brunner

Phillip D. Cagan

Milton Friedman

David E.W. Laidler

Allan H. Meltzer

Anna J. Schwartz

Bill Still

Margaret Thatcher

Clark Warburton

Alan Greenspan

See also

Inflation targeting

Macroeconomics

Political economy

Perspectives on Capitalism

List of finance topics

List of economics topics

Chicago School

Demurrage (currency)

References

Further references

Andersen, Leonall C., and Jerry L. Jordan, 1968. “Monetary and Fiscal Actions: A Test of Their Relative Importance in Economic Stabilization,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ''Review'' (November), pp. 11–24. PDF (30 sec. load: press +) and HTML.

_____, 1969. “Monetary and Fiscal Actions: A Test of Their Relative Importance in Economic Stabilization — Reply,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ''Review'' (April), pp. 12–16. PDF (15 sec. load; press +) and HTML.

Brunner, Karl, and Allan H. Meltzer, 1993. ''Money and the Economy: Issues in Monetary Analysis'', Cambridge. Description and chapter previews, pp. ix-x.

Cagan, Phillip, 1965. ''Determinants and Effects of Changes in the Stock of Money, 1875-1960''. NBER. Foreword by Milton Friedman, pp. xiii-xxviii. Table of Contents.

Friedman, Milton, ed. 1956. ''Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money'', Chicago. Chapter 1 is previewed at Friedman, 2005, ch. 2 link.

_____, 1960. ''A Program for Monetary Stability''. Fordham University Press.

_____, 1968. "The Role of Monetary Policy," ''American Economic Review'', 58(1), pp. 1-17 (press +).

_____, [1969] 2005. ''The Optimum Quantity of Money''. Description and table of contents, with previews of 3 chapters.

Friedman, Milton, and David Meiselman, 1963. “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897-1958,” in Stabilization Policies, pp. 165–268. Prentice-Hall/Commission on Money and Credit, 1963.

Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, 1963a. "Money and Business Cycles," ''Review of Economics and Statistics'', 45(1), Part 2, Supplement, p p. 32-64. Reprinted in Schwartz, 1987, ''Money in Historical Perspective'', ch. 2.

_____. 1963b. ''A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960''. Princeton. Page-searchable links to chapters on 1929-41 and 1948-60

Johnson, Harry G., 1971. "The Keynesian Revolutions and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution," ''American Economic Review'', 61(2), p p. 1-14. Reprinted in John Cunningham Wood and Ronald N. Woods, ed., 1990, ''Milton Friedman:: Critical Assessments'', v. 2, p p. 72- 88. Routledge,

Laidler, David E.W., 1993. ''The Demand for Money: Theories, Evidence, and Problems'', 4th ed. Description.

Schwartz, Anna J., 1987. ''Money in Historical Perspective'', University of Chicago Press. Description and Chapter-preview links, pp. vii-viii.

Warburton, Clark, 1966. ''Depression, Inflation, and Monetary Policy; Selected Papers, 1945-1953'' Johns Hopkins Press. Evaluation in Anna J. Schwartz, ''Money in Historical Perspective'', 1987.

External links

"Monetarism" at The New School's Economics Department's History of Economic Thought website.

Monetarism by Allan Meltzer. ''Concise encyclopedia of economics'' on Econlib

Monetarism from the Economics A-Z of The Economist

Category:Economic theories Category:Macroeconomics Category:History of economic thought, methodology, and heterodox approaches

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Coordinates	55°47′″N49°10′″N
Honorific-prefix	The Right Honourable
Name	The Baroness Thatcher
Honorific-suffix	LG OM PC FRS
Alt	Photograph
Office	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Monarch	Elizabeth II
Deputy	William WhitelawGeoffrey Howe
Term start	4 May 1979
Term end	28 November 1990
Predecessor	James Callaghan
Successor	John Major
Office2	Leader of the Opposition
Monarch2	Elizabeth II
Primeminister2	Harold WilsonJames Callaghan
Term start2	11 February 1975
Term end2	4 May 1979
Predecessor2	Edward Heath
Successor2	James Callaghan
Office3	Leader of the Conservative Party
Term start3	11 February 1975
Term end3	28 November 1990
Predecessor3	Edward Heath
Successor3	John Major
Office4	Secretary of State for Education and Science
Primeminister4	Edward Heath
Term start4	20 June 1970
Term end4	4 March 1974
Predecessor4	Edward Short
Successor4	Reginald Prentice
Office5	Member of Parliament for Finchley
Term start5	8 October 1959
Term end5	9 April 1992
Predecessor5	John Crowder
Successor5	Hartley Booth
Birthname	Margaret Hilda Roberts
Birth date	October 13, 1925
Birth place	Grantham, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom
Party	Conservative Party
Spouse	Denis Thatcher(m. 1951–2003, his death)
Children	Carol ThatcherMark Thatcher
Relations	Alfred Roberts (father)
Alma mater	Somerville College, Oxford
Profession	ChemistLawyer
Religion	Church of England(Since 1951)Methodism (Before 1951)
Signature alt	Signature written in ink }}

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, (née Roberts; born 13 October 1925) is a former Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who served from 1979 to 1990.

Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford before qualifying as a barrister. In the 1959 general election she became MP for Finchley. Edward Heath appointed Thatcher Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970 government. In 1975 she was elected Leader of the Conservative Party, the first woman to head a major UK political party, and in 1979 she became the UK's first female Prime Minister.

After entering , Thatcher was determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitous national decline.|group=nb}} Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, the sale or closure of state-owned companies, and the withdrawal of subsidies to others. Thatcher's popularity waned amid recession and high unemployment, until economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support resulting in her re-election in 1983.

Thatcher survived an assassination attempt in 1984, and her hard line against trade unions and tough rhetoric in opposition to the Soviet Union earned her the nickname of the "Iron Lady". Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her Community Charge was widely unpopular and her views on the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister and party leader in November 1990 after Michael Heseltine's challenge to her leadership of the Conservative Party.

Thatcher holds a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the House of Lords.

Early life and education

Margaret Roberts was born on 13 October 1925. Her father was Alfred Roberts, originally from Northamptonshire, and her mother was Beatrice Ethel (née Stephenson) from Lincolnshire. She spent her childhood in Grantham, where her father owned two grocery shops. She and her older sister Muriel were raised in the flat above the larger of the two, located near the railway line. Her father was active in local politics and religion, serving as an alderman and a Methodist lay preacher, and brought up his daughter as a strict Methodist. He came from a Liberal family but stood – as was then customary in local government – as an Independent. He was Mayor of Grantham in 1945–46 and lost his position as alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950.

Roberts attended Huntingtower Road Primary School and won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School. Her school reports showed hard work and continual improvement; her extracurricular activities included the piano, field hockey, poetry recitals, swimming and walking. She was head girl in 1942–43. In her upper sixth year she applied for a scholarship to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford but was initially rejected, and only offered a place after another candidate withdrew. She arrived at Oxford in 1943 and graduated in 1947 with Second Class Honours in the four-year Chemistry Bachelor of Science degree; in her final year she specialised in X-ray crystallography under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin.

Roberts became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946. She was influenced at university by political works such as Friedrich von Hayek's ''The Road to Serfdom'' (1944), which condemned economic intervention by government as a precursor to an authoritarian state.

After graduating, Roberts moved to Colchester in Essex to work as a research chemist for BX Plastics. She joined the local Conservative Association and attended the party conference at Llandudno in 1948, as a representative of the University Graduate Conservative Association. One of her Oxford friends was also a friend of the Chair of the Dartford Conservative Association in Kent, who were looking for candidates. Officials of the association were so impressed by her that they asked her to apply, even though she was not on the Conservative party's approved list: she was selected in January 1951 and added to the approved list ''post ante''. At a dinner following her formal adoption as Conservative candidate for Dartford in February 1951 she met Denis Thatcher, a successful and wealthy divorced businessman, who drove her to her Essex train. In preparation for the election Roberts moved to Dartford, where she supported herself by working as a research chemist for J. Lyons and Co. in Hammersmith, part of a team developing emulsifiers for ice cream.

Early political career

In the February 1950 and October 1951 general elections she campaigned for the safe Labour seat of Dartford, where she attracted media attention as the youngest and the only female candidate. She lost both times to Norman Dodds, but reduced the Labour majority by 6,000, and then a further 1,000. During the campaigns, she was supported by her parents and by Denis Thatcher, whom she married in December 1951. Denis funded his wife's studies for the bar; she qualified as a barrister in 1953 and specialised in taxation. That same year her twins, Carol and Mark, were born.

Member of Parliament (1959–1970)

Thatcher began looking for a safe Conservative seat in the mid-1950s. She was narrowly rejected as the candidate for Orpington in 1955, but was selected for Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat after a hard campaign in the 1959 election and was elected as a Member of Parliament (MP). Her maiden speech was in support of her private member's bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960), requiring local authorities to hold their council meetings in public. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching.

In October 1961, Thatcher was promoted to the front bench as Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in Harold Macmillan's administration. After the loss of the 1964 election she became Conservative spokesman on Housing and Land, in which position she advocated her party's policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses. She moved to the Shadow Treasury team in 1966, and as Treasury spokesman opposed Labour's mandatory price and income controls, arguing that they would produce contrary effects to those intended and distort the economy.

At the Conservative Party Conference of 1966 she criticised the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism". She argued that lower taxes served as an incentive to hard work. Thatcher was one of the few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality and voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion, as well as a ban on hare coursing. She supported the retention of capital punishment and voted against the relaxation of divorce laws.

In 1967, she was selected by the United States Embassy in London to take part in the International Visitor Leadership Program (then called the Foreign Leader Program), a professional exchange programme that gave her the opportunity to spend about six weeks visiting various US cities, political figures, and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Thatcher joined the Shadow Cabinet later that year as Shadow Fuel spokesman. Shortly before the 1970 general election, she was promoted to Shadow Transport, and then to Education.

Education Secretary (1970–1974)

The Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, and Thatcher was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science. In her first months in office she attracted public attention as a result of the administration's attempts to cut spending. She gave priority to academic needs in schools, and imposed public expenditure cuts on the state education system, resulting in the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren aged seven to eleven. She held that few children would suffer if schools were charged for milk, but she agreed to provide younger children with a third of a pint daily, for nutritional purposes. Her decision provoked a storm of protest from the Labour party and the press, and led to the moniker "Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher". Thatcher wrote in her autobiography: "I learned a valuable lesson [from the experience]. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit."

Thatcher's term of office was marked by proposals for more local education authorities to close grammar schools and to adopt comprehensive secondary education. Although she was committed to a tiered secondary modern–grammar school system of education, and determined to preserve grammar schools, during her tenure as Education Secretary she turned down only 326 of 3,612 proposals for schools to become comprehensives; the proportion of pupils attending comprehensives rose from 32% to 62%.

Leader of the Opposition (1975–1979)

The Heath government continued to experience difficulties with oil embargoes and union demands for wage increases in 1973, and was defeated in the February 1974 general election. The Conservative result in the general election of October 1974 was even worse, and Thatcher mounted a challenge for the leadership of the party. Promising a fresh start, her main support came from the Conservative 1922 Committee. She defeated Heath on the first ballot and he resigned the leadership. In the second ballot she defeated Heath's preferred successor, William Whitelaw, and became party leader on 11 February 1975; she appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained disenchanted with Thatcher to the end of his life for what he, and many of his supporters, perceived as her disloyalty in standing against him.

Thatcher began regularly to attend lunches at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a think tank founded by the poultry magnate Antony Fisher, a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek; she had been visiting the IEA and reading its publications since the early 1960s. There she was influenced by the ideas of Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, and she became the face of the ideological movement opposing the welfare state Keynesian economics they believed was weakening Britain. The institute's pamphlets proposed less government, lower taxes, and more freedom for business and consumers.

Thatcher began to work on her voice and screen image. The critic Clive James, writing in ''The Observer'' in 1977, compared her voice of 1973 to a cat sliding down a blackboard, but acknowledged her intelligence and mental agility.|group=nb}}

On 19 January 1976 Thatcher made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union:

In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper ''Krasnaya Zvezda'' (''Red Star'') gave her the nickname "Iron Lady". She took delight in the name, and it soon became associated with her image.

Despite an economic recovery in the late 1970s, the Labour government faced public unease about the direction of the country and a damaging series of strikes during the winter of 1978–79, popularly dubbed the "Winter of Discontent". The Conservatives attacked the Labour government's unemployment record, using advertising with the slogan ''Labour Isn't Working''. A general election was called after James Callaghan's government lost a motion of no confidence in early 1979. The Conservatives won a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons, and Margaret Thatcher became the UK's first female Prime Minister.

Prime Minister (1979–1990)

Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979. Arriving at 10 Downing Street, she said, in a paraphrase of the "Prayer of Saint Francis":

Domestic affairs

Thatcher was Prime Minister at a time of great racial tension in Britain. Her standing in the polls rose by 11 percent after she said in a TV interview during campaigning for the 1979 election: "The moment a minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened. The British character has done so much for democracy, for law, that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in". The Conservatives attracted voters from the National Front, whose support almost collapsed. ''The Economist'' noted "The Tory tide swamped the smaller parties, specifically the National Front, which suffered a clear decline". In confidential official documents she objected to the number of Asian immigrants in July 1979, in the context of limiting the number of Vietnamese boat people allowed to settle in the UK. Her stance on these issues was perceived as part of a rising racist public discourse, which professor Martin Barker called "new racism".

As Prime Minister, Thatcher met weekly with Queen Elizabeth II to discuss government business, and their relationship came under close scrutiny. In July 1986 the ''Sunday Times'' reported claims attributed to the Queen's advisers of a "rift" between Buckingham Palace and Downing Street "over a wide range of domestic and international issues". The Palace issued an official denial, heading off speculation about a possible constitutional crisis. After Thatcher's retirement a senior Palace source again dismissed as "nonsense" the "stereotyped idea" that she had not got along with the Queen, or that they had fallen out over Thatcherite policies. Thatcher later wrote "... I always found the Queen's attitude towards the work of the Government absolutely correct. ... stories of clashes between 'two powerful women' were just too good not to make up."

Economy and taxation

Thatcher's economic policy was influenced by monetarist thinking and economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. Together with Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe, she lowered direct taxes on income and increased indirect taxes. She increased interest rates to slow the growth of the money supply and thereby lower inflation, introduced cash limits on public spending, and reduced expenditures on social services such as education and housing. Her cuts in higher education spending resulted in her being the first Oxford-educated post-war Prime Minister not to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford, after a 738 to 319 vote of the governing assembly and a student petition. Her new centrally-funded City Technology Colleges did not enjoy much success, and the Funding Agency for Schools was set up to control expenditure by opening and closing schools; the Social Market Foundation, a right-wing think tank, described it as having "an extraordinary range of dictatorial powers".

GDP and public spending by functional classification	% change in real terms1979/80 to 1989/90
GDP	+23.3
Total government spending	+12.9
Law and order	+53.3
Employment and training	+33.3
Health	+31.8
Social security	+31.8
Transport	−5.8
Trade and industry	−38.2
Housing	−67.0
Defence	−3.3

Some Heathite Conservatives in the Cabinet, the so-called "wets", expressed doubt over Thatcher's policies. The 1981 riots in England resulted in the British media discussing the need for a policy U-turn. At the 1980 Conservative Party conference, Thatcher addressed the issue directly, with a speech written by the playwright Ronald Millar that included the lines: "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!"

Thatcher's job approval rating fell to 23% by December 1980, lower than recorded for any previous Prime Minister. As the recession of the early 1980s deepened she increased taxes, despite concerns expressed in a statement signed by 364 leading economists issued towards the end of March 1981.

By 1982 the UK began to experience signs of economic recovery; inflation was down to 8.6% from a high of 18%, but unemployment was over 3 million for the first time since the 1930s. By 1983 overall economic growth was stronger and inflation and mortgage rates were at their lowest levels since 1970, although manufacturing output had dropped by 30% since 1978 and unemployment remained high, peaking at 3.3 million in 1984.

Throughout the 1980s revenue from the 90% tax on North Sea oil extraction was used as a short-term funding source to balance the economy and pay the costs of reform.

Thatcher reformed local government taxes by replacing domestic rates—a tax based on the nominal rental value of a home—with the Community Charge (or poll tax) in which the same amount was charged to each adult resident. The new tax was introduced in Scotland in 1989 and in England and Wales the following year, and proved to be among the most unpopular policies of her premiership. Public disquiet culminated in a 70,000-strong demonstration in London on 31 March 1990; the demonstration around Trafalgar Square deteriorated into the Poll Tax Riots, leaving 113 people injured and 340 under arrest. The Community Charge was abolished by her successor, John Major.

Foreign affairs

Thatcher took office in the final decade of the Cold War and became closely aligned with the policies of United States President Ronald Reagan, based on their mutual distrust of Communism, although she strongly opposed Reagan's October 1983 invasion of Grenada. During her first year as Prime Minister she supported NATO's decision to deploy US nuclear cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe, and permitted the US to station more than 160 cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common, starting on 14 November 1983 and triggering mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She bought the Trident nuclear missile submarine system from the US to replace Polaris, tripling the UK's nuclear forces at an eventual cost of more than £12 billion (at 1996–97 prices). Thatcher's preference for defence ties with the US was demonstrated in the Westland affair of January 1986, when she acted with colleagues to allow the struggling helicopter manufacturer Westland to refuse a takeover offer from the Italian firm Agusta in favour of the management's preferred option, a link with Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation. The UK Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, who had supported the Agusta deal, resigned in protest.

On 2 April 1982 the ruling military junta in Argentina ordered the invasion of the British Falkland Islands and South Georgia, triggering the Falklands War. The subsequent crisis was "a defining moment of her [Thatcher's] premiership". At the suggestion of Harold Macmillan and Robert Armstrong, she set up and chaired a small War Cabinet (formally called ODSA, Overseas and Defence committee, South Atlantic) to take charge of the conduct of the war, which by 5–6 April had authorised and dispatched a naval task force to retake the islands. Argentina surrendered on 14 June and the operation was hailed a success, notwithstanding the deaths of 255 British servicemen and 3 Falkland Islanders. Argentinian deaths totalled 649, half of them after the nuclear-powered submarine torpedoed and sank the cruiser ARA ''General Belgrano'' on 2 May. Thatcher was criticised for the neglect of the Falklands' defence that led to the war, and notably by Tam Dalyell in parliament for the decision to sink the ''Belgrano'', but overall she was considered a highly talented and committed war leader. The "Falklands factor", an economic recovery beginning early in 1982, and a bitterly divided Labour opposition contributed to Thatcher's second election victory in 1983.

The Thatcher government supported the Khmer Rouge keeping their seat in the UN after they were ousted from power in Cambodia by the Cambodian–Vietnamese War.Although denying it at the time they also sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge alliance to fight against the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea government.

Thatcher's antipathy towards European integration became more pronounced during her premiership, particularly after her third election victory in 1987. During a 1988 speech in Bruges she outlined her opposition to proposals from the European Community (EC), forerunner of the European Union, for a federal structure and increased centralisation of decision making. She had supported British membership of the EC, despite believing that the role of the organisation should be limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that the EC's approach was at odds with her views on smaller government and deregulation; in 1988, she remarked, "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". Thatcher was firmly opposed to the UK's membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a precursor to European monetary union, believing that it would constrain the British economy, despite the urging of her Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, but she was persuaded by John Major to join in October 1990, at what proved to be too high a rate.

In April 1986, Thatcher permitted US F-111s to use Royal Air Force bases for the bombing of Libya in retaliation for the alleged Libyan bombing of a Berlin discothèque, citing the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter.|group=nb}} Polls suggested that less than one in three British citizens approved of Thatcher's decision. She was in the US on a state visit when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait in August 1990. During her talks with US President George H. W. Bush, who had succeeded Reagan in 1989, she recommended intervention, and put pressure on Bush to deploy troops in the Middle East to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Bush was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, prompting Thatcher to remark to him during a telephone conversation that "This was no time to go wobbly!" Thatcher's government provided military forces to the international coalition in the build-up to the Gulf War, but she had resigned by the time hostilities began on 17 January 1991.

Thatcher was one of the first Western leaders to respond warmly to reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Following Reagan–Gorbachev summit meetings and reforms enacted by Gorbachev in the USSR, she declared in November 1988 that "We're not in a Cold War now", but rather in a "new relationship much wider than the Cold War ever was". She went on a state visit to the Soviet Union in 1984, and met with Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Thatcher was initially opposed to German reunification, telling Gorbachev that it "would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security". She expressed concern that a united Germany would align itself more closely with the Soviet Union and move away from NATO. In contrast she was an advocate of Croatian and Slovenian independence. In a 1991 interview for Croatian Radiotelevision, Thatcher commented on the Yugoslav Wars; she was critical of Western governments for not recognising the breakaway republics of Croatia and Slovenia as independent states and supplying them with arms after the Serbian-led Yugoslav Army attacked.

Industrial relations

Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trade unions, whose leadership she accused of undermining parliamentary democracy and economic performance through strike action. Several unions launched strikes in response to legislation introduced to curb their power, but resistance eventually collapsed. Only 39% of union members voted for Labour in the 1983 general election. According to the BBC, Thatcher "managed to destroy the power of the trade unions for almost a generation".

The miners' strike was the biggest confrontation between the unions and the Thatcher government. In March 1984 the National Coal Board (NCB) proposed to close 20 of the 174 state-owned mines and cut 20,000 jobs out of 187,000. Two-thirds of the country's miners, led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) under Arthur Scargill, downed tools in protest. Thatcher refused to meet the union's demands and compared the miners' dispute to the Falklands conflict two years earlier, declaring in a speech in 1984: "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty." After a year out on strike, in March 1985, the NUM leadership conceded without a deal. The cost to the economy was estimated to be at least £1.5 billion, and the strike was blamed for much of the pound's fall against the US dollar. The government closed 25 unprofitable coal mines in 1985, and by 1992 a total of 97 had been closed; those that remained were privatised in 1994. The eventual closure of 150 coal mines, not all of which were losing money, resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and devastated entire communities. Miners had helped bring down the Heath government, and Thatcher was determined to succeed where he had failed. Her strategy of preparing fuel stocks, appointing a union-busting NCB leader in Ian MacGregor, and ensuring police were adequately trained and equipped with riot gear, contributed to her victory.

The number of stoppages across the UK peaked at 4583 in 1979, when more than 29 million working days were lost. In 1984, the year of the miners' strike, there were 1221, resulting in the loss of more than 27 million working days. Stoppages then fell steadily throughout the rest of Thatcher's premiership; in 1990 there were 630 and fewer than 2 million working days lost, and they continued to fall thereafter. Trade union membership also fell, from 13.5 million in 1979 to less than 10 million by the time Thatcher left office in 1990.

Privatisation

The policy of privatisation has been called "a crucial ingredient of Thatcherism". After the 1983 election the sale of state utilities accelerated; more than £29 billion was raised from the sale of nationalised industries, and another £18 billion from the sale of council houses.

The process of privatisation, especially the preparation of nationalised industries for privatisation, was associated with marked improvements in performance, particularly in terms of labour productivity. A number of the privatised industries including gas, water, and electricity, were natural monopolies for which privatisation involved little increase in competition. The privatised industries that demonstrated improvement often did so while still under state ownership. British Steel, for instance, made great gains in profitability while still a nationalised industry under the government-appointed chairmanship of Ian MacGregor, who faced down trade-union opposition to close plants and reduce the workforce by half. Regulation was also significantly expanded to compensate for the loss of direct government control, with the foundation of regulatory bodies like Ofgas, Oftel and the National Rivers Authority. There was no clear pattern to the degree of competition, regulation, and performance among the privatised industries; in most cases privatisation benefitted consumers in terms of lower prices and improved efficiency, but the results overall were "mixed".

Thatcher always resisted rail privatisation, and was said to have told Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley "Railway privatisation will be the Waterloo of this government. Please never mention the railways to me again." Shortly before her resignation, she accepted the arguments for privatising British Rail, which her successor John Major implemented in 1994. ''The Economist'' later considered the move to have been "a disaster".

The privatisation of public assets was combined with financial deregulation in an attempt to fuel economic growth. Geoffrey Howe abolished Britain's exchange controls in 1979, allowing more capital to be invested in foreign markets, and the Big Bang of 1986 removed many restrictions on the London Stock Exchange. The Thatcher government encouraged growth in the finance and service sectors to compensate for Britain's ailing manufacturing industry. Political economist Susan Strange called this new financial growth model "casino capitalism", reflecting her view that speculation and financial trading were becoming more important to the economy than industry.

Northern Ireland

In 1981, Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison began a hunger strike in an effort to regain the status of political prisoners that had been removed five years earlier under the preceding Labour government. Bobby Sands began the strike, saying that he would fast until death unless prison inmates won concessions over their living conditions. Thatcher refused to countenance a return to political status for the prisoners, declaring "Crime is crime is crime; it is not political", but nevertheless the UK government privately contacted republican leaders in a bid to bring the hunger strikes to an end. After the deaths of Sands and nine others some rights were restored to paramilitary prisoners, but not official recognition of their political status. Violence in Northern Ireland escalated significantly during the hunger strikes; in 1982 Sinn Féin politician Danny Morrison described Thatcher as "the biggest bastard we have ever known".

Thatcher narrowly escaped injury in a PIRA assassination attempt at a Brighton hotel early in the morning on 12 October 1984. Five people were killed, including the wife of Cabinet Minister John Wakeham. Thatcher was staying at the hotel to attend the Conservative Party Conference, which she insisted should open as scheduled the following day. She delivered her speech as planned, a move that was widely supported across the political spectrum and enhanced her popularity with the public.

On 6 November 1981 Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald had established the Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council, a forum for meetings between the two governments. On 15 November 1985, Thatcher and FitzGerald signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first time a British government had given the Republic of Ireland an advisory role in the governance of Northern Ireland. In protest the Ulster Says No movement attracted 100,000 to a rally in Belfast, Ian Gow resigned as Minister of State in the HM Treasury, and all fifteen Unionist MPs resigned their parliamentary seats; only one was not returned in the subsequent by-elections on 23 January 1986.

Resignation

Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by virtually unknown backbench MP Sir Anthony Meyer in the 1989 leadership election. Of the 374 Conservative MPs eligible to vote 314 voted for Thatcher and 33 for Meyer. Her supporters in the party viewed the result as a success, and rejected suggestions that there was discontent within the party.

During her premiership Thatcher had the second-lowest average approval rating, at 40 percent, of any post-war Prime Minister. Polls consistently showed that she was less popular than her party. A self-described conviction politician, Thatcher always insisted that she did not care about her poll ratings, pointing instead to her unbeaten election record.

Opinion polls in September 1990 reported that Labour had established a 14% lead over the Conservatives, and by November the Conservatives had been trailing Labour for 18 months. These ratings, together with Thatcher's combative personality and willingness to override colleagues' opinions, contributed to discontent within the Conservative party.

On 1 November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining member of Thatcher's original 1979 cabinet, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister over her refusal to agree to a timetable for Britain to join the European single currency. In his resignation speech on 13 November, Howe commented on Thatcher's European stance: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find the moment that the first balls are bowled that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain." His resignation was fatal to Thatcher's premiership.

The next day, Michael Heseltine mounted a challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Opinion polls had indicated that he would give the Conservatives a national lead over Labour. Although Thatcher won the first ballot, Heseltine attracted sufficient support (152 votes) to force a second ballot. Thatcher initially stated that she intended to "fight on and fight to win" the second ballot, but consultation with her Cabinet persuaded her to withdraw. After seeing the Queen, calling other world leaders, and making one final Commons speech, she left Downing Street in tears. She regarded her ousting as a betrayal.

Thatcher was replaced as Prime Minister and party leader by her Chancellor John Major, who oversaw an upturn in Conservative support in the 17 months leading up to the 1992 general election and led the Conservatives to their fourth successive victory on 9 April 1992. Thatcher favoured Major over Heseltine in the leadership contest, but her support for him weakened in later years.

Later years

Thatcher returned to the backbenches as MP for Finchley for two years after leaving the premiership. She retired from the House at the 1992 election, aged 66, saying that leaving the Commons would allow her more freedom to speak her mind.

Post-Commons

After leaving the House of Commons, Thatcher became the first former Prime Minister to set up a foundation; it closed down in 2005 because of financial difficulties. She wrote two volumes of memoirs, ''The Downing Street Years'' (1993) and ''The Path to Power'' (1995).

In July 1992, Thatcher was hired by the tobacco company Philip Morris as a "geopolitical consultant" for $250,000 per year and an annual contribution of $250,000 to her foundation. She also earned $50,000 for each speech she delivered.

In August 1992, Thatcher called for NATO to stop the Serbian assault on Goražde and Sarajevo to end ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War. She compared the situation in Bosnia to "the worst excesses of the Nazis", and warned that there could be a "holocaust". She made a series of speeches in the Lords criticising the Maastricht Treaty, describing it as "a treaty too far" and stated "I could never have signed this treaty". She cited A. V. Dicey when stating that as all three main parties were in favour of revisiting the treaty, the people should have their say.

Thatcher was honorary Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Virginia (1993–2000) and also of the University of Buckingham (1992–1999), the UK's first private university, which she had opened in 1975.

After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, Thatcher praised Blair in an interview as "probably the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved."

In 1998, Thatcher called for the release of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet when Spain had him arrested and sought to try him for human rights violations, citing the help he gave Britain during the Falklands War. In 1999, she visited him while he was under house arrest near London. Pinochet was released in March 2000 on medical grounds by the Home Secretary Jack Straw, without facing trial.

In the 2001 general election Thatcher supported the Conservative general election campaign, but did not endorse Iain Duncan Smith as she had done for John Major and William Hague. In the Conservative leadership election shortly after, she supported Smith over Kenneth Clarke.

In March 2002, Thatcher's book ''Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World'', dedicated to Ronald Reagan, was released. In it, she claimed there would be no peace in the Middle East until Saddam Hussein was toppled, that Israel must trade land for peace, and that the European Union (EU) was "fundamentally unreformable", "a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure". She argued that Britain should renegotiate its terms of membership or else leave the EU and join the North American Free Trade Area. The book was serialised in ''The Times'' on 18 March; on 23 March she announced that on the advice of her doctors she would cancel all planned speaking engagements and accept no more.

Since 2003

Sir Denis Thatcher died on 26 June 2003 and was cremated on 3 July. She had paid tribute to him in ''The Downing Street Years'', writing "Being Prime Minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend".

On 11 June 2004, Thatcher attended the state funeral service for Ronald Reagan. She delivered her eulogy via videotape; in view of her health, the message had been pre-recorded several months earlier. Thatcher then flew to California with the Reagan entourage, and attended the memorial service and interment ceremony for the president at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde Park, London, on 13 October 2005, at which the guests included the Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Alexandra and Tony Blair. Geoffrey Howe, by then Lord Howe of Aberavon, was also present, and said of his former leader: "Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible."

In 2006, Thatcher attended the official Washington, D.C. memorial service to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. She was a guest of Vice President Dick Cheney, and met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit.

In February 2007, Thatcher became the first living UK Prime Minister to be honoured with a statue in the Houses of Parliament. The bronze statue stands opposite that of her political hero, Sir Winston Churchill, and was unveiled on 21 February 2007 with Thatcher in attendance; she made a rare and brief speech in the members' lobby of the House of Commons, responding: "I might have preferred iron – but bronze will do ... It won't rust." The statue shows her addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched.

Thatcher returned to 10 Downing Street in late November 2009 for the unveiling of an official portrait by the artist Richard Stone, an unusual honour for a living ex-Prime Minister. Stone had previously painted portraits of the Queen and the Queen Mother.

Thatcher suffered several small strokes in 2002 and was advised by her doctors not to engage in any more public speaking. After collapsing at a House of Lords dinner, she was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital in central London on 7 March 2008 for tests. Her daughter Carol has recounted ongoing memory loss.

At the Conservative Party conference in 2010, the new Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he would invite Thatcher back to 10 Downing Street on her 85th birthday for a party to be attended by past and present ministers. She pulled out of the celebration because of flu. She was invited to the Royal Wedding on 29 April 2011 but did not attend, reportedly due to ill health.

On American Independence Day 2011 (4 July) Lady Thatcher was to attend a ceremony for the unveiling of a 10-foot statue to former American President Ronald Reagan, outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London but was unable to attend due to frail health. On 31 July 2011 it was announced that the former prime minister’s office in the House of Lords had been closed down.

Also in July 2011, Thatcher was named the most competent British Prime Minister of the past 30 years in an Ipsos Mori poll.

Legacy

Thatcher remains identified with her remarks to the reporter Douglas Keay, for ''Woman's Own'' magazine in September 1987:

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To her supporters, Margaret Thatcher remains a figure who revitalised Britain's economy, impacted the trade unions, and re-established the nation as a world power. She oversaw an increase from 7% to 25% of adults owning shares, and more than a million families bought their council houses, giving an increase from 55% to 67% in owner-occupiers. Total personal wealth rose by 80%. Victory in the Falklands conflict and her strong alliance with the United States are also remembered as some of her greatest achievements.

Thatcher's premiership was also marked by high unemployment and social unrest, and many critics fault her economic policies for the unemployment level; many of the areas affected by high unemployment as a result of her monetarist economic policieshave still not fully recovered and are also blighted by social problems including drug abuse and family breakdown. Speaking in Scotland in April 2009, before the 30th anniversary of her election as Prime Minister, Thatcher insisted she had no regrets, and was right to introduce the poll tax and to remove subsidies from "outdated industries, whose markets were in terminal decline" which had created "the culture of dependency, which had done such damage to Britain".

Thatcher often referred after the war to the "Falklands Spirit"; Hastings and Jenkins (1983) suggested that this reflected her preference for the streamlined decision-making of her War Cabinet over the painstaking deal-making of peace-time cabinet government.

Critics have regretted Thatcher's influence in the abandonment of full employment, poverty reduction and a consensual civility as bedrock policy objectives. Many recent biographers have been critical of aspects of the Thatcher years and Michael White, writing in ''New Statesman'' in February 2009, challenged the view that her reforms had brought a net benefit. Despite being Britain's first woman Prime Minister, some critics contend Thatcher did "little to advance the political cause of women", either within her party or the government, and some British feminists regarded her as "an enemy".

The term "Thatcherism" came to refer to her policies as well as aspects of her ethical outlook and personal style, including moral absolutism, nationalism, interest in the individual, and an uncompromising approach to achieving political goals.|group=nb}}. Influenced at the outset by Keith Joseph, Thatcherism remains a potent byword in British political parlance, with both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown defining policies in post-Thatcherite terms, and David Cameron saying after a dinner with Thatcher in February 2009: "You have got to do the right thing even if it is painful. Don't trim or track all over the place. Set your course and take the difficult decisions because that is what needs to be done ... I think that influence, that character she had, that conviction she had, I think that will be very important."

Thatcher's tenure of 11 years and 209 days as Prime Minister was the longest since Lord Salisbury (13 years and 252 days in three spells starting in 1885), and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool (14 years and 305 days starting in 1812).

Honours

Thatcher became a Privy Councillor (PC) upon becoming Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1970. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit (OM) (an order within the personal gift of the Queen) within two weeks of leaving office. Denis Thatcher was made a Baronet at the same time. She became a peer in the House of Lords in 1992 with a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire. She was appointed a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter, the UK's highest order of chivalry, in 1995.

She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983, and was the first woman entitled to full membership rights as an honorary member of the Carlton Club on becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 1975.

In the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher Day has been marked every 10 January since 1992, commemorating her visit in 1983. Thatcher Drive in Stanley is named for her, as is Thatcher Peninsula in South Georgia, where the task force troops first set foot on the Falklands.

Thatcher has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour awarded by the US; the Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom; and the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award. She is a patron of the Heritage Foundation, which established the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in 2005. Speaking of Heritage president Ed Feulner, at the first Clare Booth Luce lecture in September 1993, Thatcher said: "You didn't just advise President Reagan on what he should do; you told him how he could do it. And as a practising politician I can testify that that is the only advice worth having." Other awards include Dame Grand Cross of the Croatian Grand Order of King Dmitar Zvonimir.

Upon Thatcher's eventual death, it is rumoured that she will be honoured with a state funeral at St Paul's Cathedral. If so, she will be the first prime minister to be honoured this way since Sir Winston Churchill in 1965.

Media depictions

Depictions of Margaret Thatcher have featured in a number of television programmes, documentaries, films and plays; she was played by Patricia Hodge in Ian Curteis's long unproduced ''The Falklands Play'' (2002) and Lindsay Duncan in ''Margaret'' (2009). She was portrayed by Andrea Riseborough in the TV film ''The Long Walk to Finchley''. Thatcher will be played by Meryl Streep in the 2011 film ''The Iron Lady''.

Thatcher was lampooned by satirist John Wells in several media. Wells collaborated with Richard Ingrams on the spoof "Dear Bill" letters which ran as a column in ''Private Eye'' magazine, were published in book form, and were then adapted into a West End stage revue as ''Anyone for Denis?'', starring Wells as Denis Thatcher. The stage show was followed by a 1982 TV special directed by Dick Clement. In 1979, Wells was commissioned by comedy producer Martin Lewis to write and perform on a comedy record album titled ''Iron Lady: The Coming Of The Leader'' on which Thatcher was portrayed by comedienne and noted Thatcher impersonator Janet Brown. The album consisted of skits and songs satirising Thatcher's rise to power.

In ''Spitting Image'', Thatcher was portrayed as a bullying tyrant, wearing trousers, and ridiculing her own ministers.

Protest songs

Thatcher was the subject or the inspiration for a number of protest songs including The Specials' "Ghost Town", (1981), and The Jam's "Town Called Malice" (Number One in February 1982). Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding" protested against the Falklands war. Songwriter Billy Bragg released ''Workers Playtime'' in 1988. Paul Weller was a founding member of Red Wedge collective, which unsuccessfully sought to oust Thatcher with the help of music. In 1987, they organised a comedy tour with British comedians Lenny Henry, Ben Elton, Robbie Coltrane, Harry Enfield and others.

References

Notes

Footnotes

Bibliography

Further reading

;Biographies

; Political analysis

;Books by Thatcher

;Ministerial autobiographies

External links

Margaret Thatcher Foundation

Margaret Thatcher on the Downing Street website.

Records of the Prime Minister's Office, digitised files from the Prime Minister's Office, covering from the 1979 general election to December 1979.

Actresses (and actors) who have portrayed Thatcher, ''The Telegraph'' (London), 8 February 2011. Retrieved 28 May 2011

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Coordinates	55°47′″N49°10′″N
Honorific-prefix	The Right Honourable
Name	Tony Benn
Office	President of the Stop the War Coalition
Vicepresident	Lindsey German
Term start	21 September 2001
Predecessor	Office created
Office2	Secretary of State for Energy
Primeminister2	Harold WilsonJames Callaghan
Term start2	10 June 1975
Term end2	4 May 1979
Predecessor2	Eric Varley
Successor2	David Howell
Office3	Secretary of State for Industry
Primeminister3	Harold Wilson
Term start3	5 March 1974
Term end3	10 June 1975
Predecessor3	Peter Walker (at DTI)
Successor3	Eric Varley
Office4	Chairman of the Labour Party
Leader4	Harold Wilson
Term start4	20 September 1971
Term end4	25 September 1972
Predecessor4	Ian Mikardo
Successor4	William Simpson
Office5	Minister of Technology
Primeminister5	Harold Wilson
Term start5	4 July 1966
Term end5	19 June 1970
Predecessor5	Frank Cousins
Successor5	Geoffrey Rippon
Office6	Postmaster General
Primeminister6	Harold Wilson
Term start6	15 October 1964
Term end6	4 July 1966
Predecessor6	Reginald Bevins
Successor6	Edward Short
Office8	Member of Parliament for Bristol South East
Term start9	30 November 1950
Term end9	17 November 1960
Predecessor9	Stafford Cripps
Successor9	Malcolm St Clair
Majority9	13,044 (39%)
Term start8	20 August 1963
Term end8	9 June 1983
Predecessor8	Malcolm St Clair
Successor8	Constituency Abolished
Majority8	1,890 (3.5%)
Office7	Member of Parliament for Chesterfield
Term start7	1 March 1984
Term end7	7 June 2001
Predecessor7	Eric Varley
Successor7	Paul Holmes
Majority7	24,633 (46.5%)
Birth date	April 03, 1925
Birth place	Marylebone, London, United Kingdom
Party	Labour
Nationality	British
Spouse	Caroline DeCamp(m. 1949–2000)
Children	Stephen, Hilary, Melissa, Joshua
Alma mater	New College, Oxford
Religion	Agnostic - United Reformed Church
Website	Official website
Branch	Royal Air Force
Rank	Pilot Officer
Battles	World War II }}

Anthony Neil Wedgwood "Tony" Benn (born 3 April 1925) is a British Labour Party politician, former MP and Cabinet Minister. He is the current President of the Stop the War Coalition.

With his successful campaign to renounce his inherited title (inherited from his father, a politician who had been made a Labour peer in 1942), Benn was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963. Later, in the Labour Government of 1964–1970 under Harold Wilson, he served first as Postmaster General, where he oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, and later as a notably "technocratic" Minister of Technology, retaining his seat in the cabinet. In the period when the Labour Party was in opposition, Benn served for a year as the Chairman of the Labour Party. In the Labour Government of 1974–1979, he returned to the Cabinet, initially serving as Secretary of State for Industry, before being made Secretary of State for Energy, retaining his post when James Callaghan replaced Wilson as Prime Minister. During the Labour Party's time in opposition during the 1980s, he was seen as the party's prominent figure on the left, and the term "Bennite" (a term never actually used by Benn himself) has come to be used in Britain for someone of a more radical, left-wing position. According to the historian Alwyn W. Turner, Benn had "emerged during the 1970s as the most persuasive and charismatic leader of the left for two decades, charming, funny and impassioned, as adept in the television studio as he was at mass rallies."

Benn, second only to John Parker as Labour's longest-serving Member of Parliament, has come top in several polls as one of the most popular politicians in Britain. He has been described as "one of the few UK politicians to have become more left-wing after holding ministerial office." Since leaving parliament, Benn has become more involved in the grass-roots politics of demonstrations and meetings, as opposed to parliamentary activities. He has been a vegetarian since the 1970s.

Biography

Early life and family

Benn was born in London on 3 April 1925. Benn's paternal grandfather was John Benn (a successful politician who had been created a baronet in 1914) and his father William Wedgwood Benn was a Liberal Member of Parliament who later crossed the floor to the Labour Party. He was appointed Secretary of State for India by Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, a position he held until 1931. He would later be elevated to the House of Lords, with the title of 1st Viscount Stansgate in 1941; the new wartime coalition government was short of working Labour peers in the upper house. From 1945 to 1946, he was the Secretary of State for Air in the first majority Labour Government.

Both his grandfathers, John Benn (who founded a publishing company) and Daniel Holmes, were also Liberal MPs (respectively, for Tower Hamlets, Devonport and Glasgow Govan). Benn's contact with leading politicians of the day thus dates back to his earliest years as a result of his family's profile; he met Ramsay MacDonald when he was five, David Lloyd George when he was twelve and Mahatma Gandhi in 1931, while his father was Secretary of State for India.

Benn's mother Margaret Eadie (née Holmes) (1897–1991), was a dedicated theologian, feminist and the founder President of the Congregational Federation. She was a member of the ''League of the Church Militant'', which was the predecessor of the ''Movement for the Ordination of Women'' – in 1925 she was rebuked by Randall Thomas Davidson, then-Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women. His mother's theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were based around the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught righteousness.

Benn was a pupil at Westminster School and later studied at New College, Oxford where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947. In later life, Benn attempted to remove public references to his private education from ''Who's Who''; in the 1975 edition his entry stated "Education—still in progress". In the 1976 edition, almost all details of his biography were omitted save for his name, jobs as a Member of Parliament and as a Government Minister, and address; the publishers confirmed that Benn had sent back his draft entry with everything else struck through. In the 1977 edition, Benn's entry disappeared entirely. In October 1973 he announced on BBC Radio that he wished to be known as "Mr Tony Benn" and his book ''Speeches'' from 1974 is credited to "Tony Benn".

Benn met US-born Caroline Middleton DeCamp (born 13 October 1926, Cincinnati, Ohio) over tea at Worcester College in 1949 and nine days later he proposed to her on a park bench in the city. Later, he bought the bench from Oxford City Council and installed it in the garden of their home in Holland Park. Tony and Caroline had four children—Stephen, Hilary, Melissa and Joshua, and ten grandchildren. Caroline Benn died of cancer on 22 November 2000, aged 74, after a prominent career as an educationalist.

In July 1943, Benn joined the Royal Air Force. His father and brother Michael (who was later killed in an accident) were already serving in the RAF in 1943. Whilst holding the rank of pilot officer, Tony Benn served as a pilot in South Africa and Rhodesia.

Benn's children have also been active in politics; his first son Stephen served as an elected Member of the Inner London Education Authority from 1986 to 1990. His second son Hilary served as a councillor in London, and stood for Parliament in 1983 and 1987, finally becoming the Labour MP for Leeds Central in 1999. He served as Secretary of State for International Development from 2003 to 2007, and then as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs until 2010. This makes him the third generation of his family to have sat in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, a rare distinction for a modern political family in Britain. Benn's granddaughter Emily Benn fought and ultimately lost the seat of East Worthing and Shoreham in 2010, becoming the Labour Party's youngest ever candidate in the process. Tony Benn is a first cousin once removed of the late actress Dame Margaret Rutherford.

Member of Parliament

Following his Second World War service as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, Benn worked briefly as a BBC Radio producer. On 1 November 1950, he was unexpectedly selected to succeed Sir Stafford Cripps as the Labour candidate for Bristol South East, after Cripps stood down because of ill-health, and won the seat in a by-election on 30 November 1950. Anthony Crosland helped him get the seat as he was the MP for nearby South Gloucestershire at the time. Upon taking the oath on 4 December 1950 Benn became the youngest MP, or "Baby of the House" for one day, being succeeded by Thomas Teevan, who was two years younger but took his oath a day later. He became the "Baby" again in 1951, when Teevan was not re-elected. In the 1950s, Benn held middle-of-the-road or soft left views, and was not associated with the young left wing group around Aneurin Bevan.

Peerage reform

Benn's father had been created Viscount Stansgate in 1942 when Winston Churchill increased the number of Labour peers to aid political work in the House of Lords; at this time, Benn's elder brother Michael was intending to enter the priesthood and had no objections to inheriting a peerage. However, Michael was later killed in an accident while on active service in the Second World War, and this left Tony Benn as the heir to the peerage. He made several attempts to renounce the succession, but they were unsuccessful.

In November 1960, Viscount Stansgate died, and as a result Benn automatically became a peer and was thus prevented from sitting in the House of Commons. Insisting on his right to abandon his peerage, Benn fought to retain his seat in a by-election caused by his succession on 4 May 1961. Although he was disqualified from taking his seat, the voters of Bristol South-East re-elected him regardless. An election court found that the voters were fully aware that Benn was disqualified, and declared the seat won by the Conservative runner-up, Malcolm St Clair, who was at the time also the heir presumptive to a peerage.

Outside Parliament, Benn continued his campaign, and eventually the Conservative Government of the time accepted the need for a change in the law. The Peerage Act 1963, allowing renunciation of peerages, was given the Royal Assent and became law shortly after 6 pm on 31 July 1963. Benn was the first peer to renounce his title, at 6.22 pm that day. Malcolm St. Clair, fulfilling a promise he had made at the time of his seating, then accepted the office of Stewardship of the Manor of Northstead, thereby disqualifying himself from the House (outright resignation being impermissible). Benn returned to the Commons after winning a by-election on 20 August 1963.

In government (1964–1970)

In the 1964 Government of Harold Wilson, Benn was appointed Postmaster General; during his time in that position, he oversaw the opening of what was then the UK's tallest building, the Post Office Tower, and the creations of the Postal Bus Service and Girobank. He proposed issuing stamps without the Sovereign's head, but this met with private opposition from the Queen. Instead, the portrait was reduced to a small profile in silhouette, a format that is still used on commemorative stamps today. Benn also led the government's campaign to close down the many off-shore pirate radio stations of the time, a campaign that forms the centrepiece of the 2009 film ''The Boat That Rocked'', and was responsible for introducing the Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill. By the time the bill became law in 1967, Benn had been promoted to the post of Minister of Technology, which included specific responsibility for overseeing the development of Concorde and the formation of International Computers Ltd. The period also saw government involvement in industrial rationalisation, and the merger of several car companies to form British Leyland. Labour lost the 1970 election to Edward Heath's Conservatives, and upon Heath's application to join the European Economic Community, Benn campaigned in favour of a referendum on the UK's membership. The Shadow Cabinet voted to support a referendum on 29 March 1972, and as a result Roy Jenkins resigned as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

In government (1974–1979)

In the Labour Government of 1974, Benn was appointed Secretary of State for Industry, where he set up worker cooperatives in struggling industries, the best known being at Meriden, which kept Triumph Motorcycles in production until 1983. In 1975, he was appointed Secretary of State for Energy, immediately following his ultimately unsuccessful campaign for a "No" vote in the referendum on the UK's membership of the EEC. By his own admission in his diary (25 October 1977), Benn "loathed" the EEC; he claimed it was "bureaucratic and centralised" and "of course it is really dominated by Germany. All the Common Market countries except the UK have been occupied by Germany, and they have this mixed feeling of hatred and subservience towards the Germans".

Harold Wilson resigned as Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister in March 1976. Benn entered the subsequent leadership contest and came fourth with 37 votes in the first ballot. Benn then withdrew from the second ballot and supported Michael Foot for the leadership, although James Callaghan eventually won. Despite not receiving his support in the vote, Callaghan kept Benn as Energy Secretary. Later in the autumn of 1976, there was a sterling crisis, and then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey sought to gain a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Benn publicly circulated the Cabinet minutes from the 1931 National Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald, which cut unemployment benefits in order to secure a loan from American bankers and resulted in the inadvertent splitting of the Labour Party. Callaghan allowed Benn to put forward his "alternative economic strategy", which consisted of a siege economy. However this plan would later be rejected by the Cabinet.

Move to the Left

By the end of the 1970s, Benn had migrated to the left-wing of the Labour Party. He attributed this political shift to his experience as a Cabinet Minister in the 1964–1970 Labour Government. Benn wrote:

As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government. Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes is minuscule. This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the IMF secured cuts in our public expenditure. These lessons led me to the conclusion that the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact. If the British people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is, and some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum.

Benn's philosophy consisted of a form of syndicalism, economic planning, greater democracy in the structures of the Labour Party and observance of Party conference decisions by the Party leadership; he was vilified in the right-wing press, and his enemies implied that a Benn-led Labour Government would implement a type of East European socialism. Conversely, Benn was overwhelmingly popular with Labour activists. A survey of delegates at the Labour Conference of 1978 found that by large margins they supported both Benn for the leadership and many Bennite policies.

He publicly supported Sinn Féin and the unification of Ireland, although in 2005 he suggested to Sinn Féin leaders that Sinn Féin abandon its long-standing policy of not taking seats at Westminster. Sinn Féin argue that to do so would recognise Britain's claim over Northern Ireland, and the Sinn Féin constitution prevents its elected members from taking their seats in any British-created institution.

In opposition

In a keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference of 1980, shortly before the resignation of party leader James Callaghan and election of Michael Foot as successor, Benn outlined what he envisaged the next Labour Government would do. "Within days", a Labour Government would grant powers to nationalise industries, control capital and implement industrial democracy; "within weeks", all powers from Brussels would be returned to Westminster and then they would abolish the House of Lords by creating one thousand peers and then abolishing the peerage. Benn received tumultuous applause from the audience.

In 1981, he stood for election against the incumbent Denis Healey for the post of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, disregarding the appeal from Michael Foot either to stand for the leadership, or to abstain from inflaming the party's divisions. Benn defended his decision with insistence that it was "not about personalities, but about policies." The contest was extremely closely fought in the summer of 1981, and Healey eventually won by a margin of barely 1%. The decision of several moderate left-wing MPs, including Neil Kinnock, to abstain from supporting Benn triggered the split of the Campaign Group from the Left of the Tribune Group.

After Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, Benn argued that the dispute should be settled by the United Nations and that the British Government should not send a task force to recapture the islands. The task force was sent and the Falklands were soon back in British control. In a subsequent debate in the Commons, Benn's demand for "a full analysis of the costs in life, equipment and money in this tragic and unnecessary war" was rejected by Margaret Thatcher, who, apparently unaware that Benn had served during the Second World War, stated that "he would not enjoy the freedom of speech that he put to such excellent use unless people had been prepared to fight for it".

In 1983, Benn's Bristol South East constituency was abolished by boundary changes, and he subsequently lost the battle to stand in the new seat of Bristol South to Michael Cocks. Rejecting offers from the new seat of Livingston in Scotland, Benn contested Bristol East, losing to Conservative candidate Jonathan Sayeed in what was perceived to be a shock result. He was selected for the next Labour seat to fall vacant, and was elected as MP for Chesterfield in a by-election after Eric Varley resigned his seat to head Coalite. On the day of the by-election, 1 March 1984, ''The Sun'' newspaper ran a hostile feature article "Benn on the Couch" which purported to be the opinions of an American psychiatrist. In the intervening period, since Benn's defeat in Bristol, Michael Foot had stepped down after the general election in June 1983 (which saw Labour return a mere 209 MPs) and was succeeded in October of that year by Neil Kinnock.

Benn was a prominent supporter of the 1984-1985 UK miners' strike and of his long-standing friend, the National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill. Some miners, however, considered Benn's 1977 industry reforms to have caused problems during the strike; firstly, that they led to huge wage differences and distrust between miners of different regions; and secondly, that the controversy over balloting miners for these reforms made it unclear as to whether a ballot was needed for a strike or whether it could be deemed as a "regional matter" in the same way that the 1977 reforms had been.

In June 1985, three months after the miners admitted defeat and ended their strike, Benn introduced the Miners' Amnesty (General Pardon) Bill in the Commons which would have extended an amnesty to all miners imprisoned during the strike. This would have included two men convicted of murder (later reduced to manslaughter) for the killing of David Wilkie, a taxi driver driving a non-striking miner to work in South Wales during the strike.

Benn later stood for election as Party Leader in 1988, against Neil Kinnock, following Labour's third successive defeat in the 1987 general election, and lost again, on this occasion by a substantial margin. During the Gulf War, he visited Baghdad to persuade Saddam Hussein to release the hostages who had been captured. He was also one of the very few MPs to oppose the Kosovo War. In 1991, with Labour still in opposition and another general election due by June 1992, he proposed the Commonwealth of Britain Bill, which involved abolishing the British Monarchy in favour of the United Kingdom becoming a "democratic, federal and secular commonwealth"; in effect, a republic with a written constitution. It was read in Parliament a number of times until his retirement at the 2001 election, but never achieved a second reading. He presented an account of his proposal in ''Common Sense: A New Constitution for Britain''.

Retirement

Tony Benn did not stand at the 2001 general election; as he explained it, he was "leaving parliament in order to spend more time on politics". Along with Edward Heath, Benn was given the privilege of being able to continue using the House of Commons Library and Members' refreshment facilities by the Speaker. Shortly after his retirement, he was approached by the Stop the War Coalition, and was asked to become its President, an offer he accepted. He thus became a leading figure of the British opposition to the War on Iraq, and in February 2003 he travelled to Baghdad to again meet, and interview, Saddam Hussein. The interview was shown on British television. He also spoke out against the Iraq war at the February 2003 protest in London organised by the Stop the War Coalition, attended by over 1 million people. In February 2004 and 2008, he was re-elected President of the Stop the War Coalition.

He has toured with a one-man stage show and also appears a few times each year in a two-man show with folk singer Roy Bailey. In 2003, his show with Bailey was voted 'Best Live Act' at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. In 2002 he opened the "Left Field" stage at the Glastonbury Festival. In October 2003, Benn was a guest of British Airways on the last-ever scheduled Concorde flight from New York to London. In June 2005, Benn was a panellist on a special edition of BBC1's ''Question Time''. The special edition was edited entirely by a school age film crew selected by a BBC competition.

On 21 June 2005, Benn presented a programme on democracy as part of the Channel 5 series ''Big Ideas That Changed The World'', he presented a left-wing view of democracy as the means to pass power from the "wallet to the ballot". He argued that traditional social democratic values were under threat in an increasingly globalised world in which powerful institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Commission remain unelected and unaccountable to those whose lives they affect daily. On 27 September 2005, Benn was taken ill at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton and taken by ambulance to the Royal Sussex County Hospital after being treated by paramedics at the Brighton Centre. Benn reportedly fell and struck his head. He was to be kept in hospital for observation, but was described as being in a "comfortable condition". He was subsequently fitted with an artificial pacemaker to help regulate his heartbeat. In a list compiled by the magazine ''New Statesman'' in 2006, he was voted twelfth in the list of "Heroes of our Time".

In September 2006, Benn joined the "Time to Go" demonstration in Manchester the day before the start of the final Labour Conference with Tony Blair as Party Leader, with the aim of persuading the Labour Government to withdraw troops from Iraq, to refrain from attacking Iran and to reject replacing the Trident missile and submarines with a new system. He spoke to the demonstrators in the rally afterwards along with other politicians and journalists, including George Galloway and members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 2007, he appeared in an extended segment in the Michael Moore film ''Sicko'' giving comments about democracy, social responsibility, and health care. A poll by the BBC2 ''The Daily Politics'' programme in January 2007 selected Benn as the UK's "Political Hero" with 38.22% of the vote, beating Margaret Thatcher with 35.3% and five other contenders including Alex Salmond, Leader of the Scottish National Party; Clare Short, Independent MP; Neil Kinnock, previous Labour Party Leader; Norman Tebbit, previous Conservative Party Chairman and Shirley Williams, one of the 'gang of four' who founded the Social Democratic Party.

In the 2007 Labour Party leadership election, Tony Benn backed the left-wing MP John McDonnell in his ultimately unsuccessful bid. In September 2007, Benn called for the government to hold a referendum on the EU Reform Treaty. In October 2007, at the age of 82, and when it appeared that a general election was about to be held, Benn reportedly announced that he wanted to stand, having written to his local Kensington and Chelsea Constituency Labour Party offering himself as a prospective candidate for the seat held by the Conservative Malcolm Rifkind. No election, however, was ultimately held in 2007, and the Kensington and Chelsea seat was abolished.

In September 2008, Benn appeared on the DVD release for the ''Doctor Who'' story ''The War Machines'' with a vignette discussing the Post Office Tower; he became the second Labour politician, after Roy Hattersley to appear in a feature on a ''Doctor Who'' DVD. Also in 2008, Benn appeared on track 12 "Pay Attention to the Human" on Colin MacIntyre's ''The Water'' album.

At the Stop the War Conference 2009, he described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as "Imperialist war(s)" and discussed the killing of American and allied troops by Iraqi or foreign insurgents, questioning whether they were in fact freedom fighters, and comparing the insurgents to a British Dad's Army, saying "If you are invaded you have a right to self defence, and this idea that people in Iraq and Afghanistan who are resisting the invasion are militant Muslim extremists is a complete bloody lie. I joined Dad's Army when I was sixteen, and if the Germans had arrived, I tell you, I could use a bayonet, a rifle, a revolver, and if I'd seen a German officer having a meal I'd have tossed a grenade through the window. Would I have been a freedom fighter or a terrorist?"

In an interview published in Dartford Living in September 2009, Benn was critical of the Government's decision to delay the findings of the Iraq War Inquiry until after the General Election, stating that "people can take into account what the inquiry has reported on but they’ve deliberately pushed it beyond the election. Government is responsible for explaining what it has done and I don’t think we were told the truth." He also stated that local government was strangled by Margaret Thatcher and hadn't been liberalised by New Labour.

During the autumn of 2009, Tony Benn was again admitted into hospital and as a result of this, "An Evening with Tony Benn", scheduled to take place at London's Cadogan Hall was cancelled. He resumed a tour of these shows in 2010. In July 2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University Of Glamorgan, Wales.

Diaries and biographies

Benn is a prolific diarist: eight volumes of his diaries have been published (the first six collected as ISBN 0-09-963411-2, the penultimate available as ISBN 0-09-941502-X). Collections of his speeches and writings were published as ''Arguments for Socialism'' (1979), ''Arguments for Democracy'' (1981), (both edited by Chris Mullin), ''Fighting Back'' (1988) and (with Andrew Hood) ''Common Sense'' (1993), as well as ''Free Radical: New Century Essays'' (2004). In August 2003, London DJ Charles Bailey created an album of Benn's speeches (ISBN 1-904734-03-0) set to ambient groove.

He has also made public several episodes of audio diaries he made during his time in Parliament and after retirement, entitled 'The Benn Tapes', broadcast originally on BBC Radio 4. Short series of these have been played periodically on BBC Radio 7. A major biography was written by Jad Adams and published by Macmillan in 1992. ''Tony Benn: A Biography'' (ISBN 0-333-52558-2) A more recent 'semi-authorised' biography, with a foreword by Benn, was published in 2001: David Powell, ''Tony Benn: A Political Life'', Continuum Books (ISBN 978-0826464156). An autobiography, ''Dare to be a Daniel: Then and Now'', Hutchinson (ISBN 978-0099471530), was published in 2004.

There are substantial essays on Benn in both the ''Dictionary of Labour Biography'' by Phillip Whitehead, Greg Rosen [ed], Politicos Publishing, 2001 (ISBN 978-1902301181) and in ''Labour Forces: From Ernie Bevin to Gordon Brown'', Kevin Jefferys [ed], I. B. Taurus Publishing, 2002 (ISBN 978-1860647437). Michael Moore dedicates his book ''Mike's Election Guide 2008'' (ISBN 978-0141039817) to Tony Benn with: "For Tony Benn, keep teaching us".

See also

Labour Party

Labour Representation Committee

Socialist Campaign Group

Stop the War Coalition

References

Bibliography

Diaries

Tony Benn ''Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67'', Hutchinson (1987) ISBN 978-0091706609

Tony Benn ''Office Without Power: Diaries 1968-72'', Hutchinson (1988) ISBN 978-0091736477

Tony Benn ''Against the Tide: Diaries 1973-76'', Hutchinson (1989) ISBN 978-0091737757

Tony Benn ''Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-80'', Hutchinson (1990) ISBN 978-0091743215

Tony Benn ''The End of an Era: Diaries 1980-90'', Hutchinson (1992) ISBN 978-0091748579

Tony Benn ''Years of Hope: Diaries, Letters and Papers, 1940-62'', Hutchinson (1994) ISBN 978-0091785345

Tony Benn ''The Benn Diaries: Single Volume Edition 1940-90'', Hutchinson (1995) ISBN 978-0091792237

Tony Benn ''Free at Last!: Diaries 1991-2001'', Hutchinson (2002) ISBN 978-0091793524

Tony Benn ''More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007'', Hutchinson (2007) ISBN 978-0099517054

Essays and biography

Tony Benn ''Levellers and the English Democratic Tradition'', Spokesman Books (1976) ISBN 978-0851246338

Tony Benn ''Why America Needs Democratic Socialism'', Spokesman Books (1978) ISBN 978-0851242668

Tony Benn ''Prospects'', Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section (1979)

Tony Benn ''Case for Constitutional Civil Service'', Inst. for Workers' Control (1980) ISBN 978-0901740670

Tony Benn ''Case for Party Democracy'', Inst. for Workers' Control (1980) ISBN 978-0901740700

Tony Benn ''Arguments for Socialism'', Penguin Books (1980) ISBN 978-0140054897

Tony Benn and Chris Mullin ''Arguments for Democracy'', Jonathan Cape (1981) ISBN 978-0224018784

Tony Benn ''European Unity: A New Perspective'', Spokesman Books (1981) ISBN 978-0851243269

Tony Benn ''Parliament and Power: Agenda for a Free Society'', Verso Books (1982) ISBN 978-0860910572

Tony Benn & Andrew Hood ''Common Sense: New Constitution for Britain'', Hutchinson (1993)

Tony Benn ''Free Radical: New Century Essays'', Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd (2004) ISBN 978-0826474001

Tony Benn ''Dare to Be a Daniel: Then and Now'', Arrow Books Ltd (2005) ISBN 978-0099471530

Tony Benn ''Letters To My Grandchildren: Thoughts On The Future'' Arrow Books (2010) ISBN 978-0099539094

External links

Tony Benn blog of quotes and speeches

Unofficial Tony Benn site with extensive interview, articles, audio and visual

'Face-to-Face with Tony Benn'. Freeview video interview by the Vega Science Trust

Tony Benn's interview with ''The Third Estate''.

Andrew Roth. Tony Benn Chesterfield and Bristol South East MP, ''The Guardian'', 25 March 2001.

''Guardian'' web guide to the veteran leftwinger Tony Benn

Tony Benn interview for Leftfield appearances at the Glastonbury Festival

Tony Benn. Atomic hypocrisy: West is not in a position to take a high moral line, ''The Guardian'', 30 November 2005.

Amy Goodman. Interview with Tony Benn: How Britain secretly helped Israel build its nuclear arsenal, ''Democracy Now!'', 10 March 2006.

The Commonwealth - UK government site

Benn in the 1960s as seen by ''Private Eye''

Audio interview with ''The Guardian''.

His Address to the College Historical Society of Trinity College

Interview with Tony Benn - Radio France Internationale - 28 March 2008 - 6 minute audio - Ahead of G20 marches, London

Tony Benn on Tony Blair: "He Is Guilty of a War Crime" - video report by ''Democracy Now!''

|- |- |- |- |- |- |- |- |- |- |- |- |- ! colspan="3" style="background:#cfc;" | Order of precedence in Northern Ireland |-

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ar:توني بين cy:Tony Benn de:Tony Benn eo:Tony Benn fr:Tony Benn it:Tony Benn lt:Tony Benn nl:Tony Benn no:Tony Benn pl:Tony Benn ru:Бенн, Тони fi:Tony Benn

Coordinates	55°47′″N49°10′″N
name	Adam Curtis
alt	Adam Curtis
birth name	Adam Curtis
birth date	May 26, 1955
death date
nationality	United Kingdom
occupation	Documentarian }}

Adam Curtis (born 1955) is an award-winning British documentarian and writer. He has also worked as a television producer, director and narrator. He works for BBC Current Affairs.

Early life and education

Curtis was born in 1955. He attended the Sevenoaks School, where he was a member of the 'Art Room' that produced musicians Tom Greenhalgh and Mark White of The Mekons, along with Andy Gill and Jon King of Gang of Four.

Curtis completed a Bachelor of Arts in Human Sciences at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, where he studied genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, sociology and elementary statistics. After graduating, Curtis taught Politics at the University for a time.

Career

He left academia to make a career in television, obtaining a post on ''That's Life!'', a programme that often placed serious and humorous content in close juxtaposition.

Curtis makes extensive use of archive footage in his documentaries. He has acknowledged the influence of recordings made by Erik Durschmied and to "constantly using his stuff in my films". An ''Observer'' profile said of Curtis' style:

: Curtis has a remarkable feel for the serendipity of such moments, and an obsessive skill in locating them. "That kind of footage shows just how dull I can be," he admits, a little glumly. "The BBC has an archive of all these tapes where they have just dumped all the news items they have ever shown. One tape for every three months. So what you get is this odd collage, an accidental treasure trove. You sit in a darkened room, watch all these little news moments, and look for connections."

''The Observer'' adds "if there has been a theme in Curtis's work since, it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts."

Curtis received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2005. In 2006 he was given the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television at the British Academy Television Awards. In 2009 Sheffield Doc/Fest awarded Curtis the inaugural Sheffield Inspiration Award for his inspiration to documentary makers and audiences.

Documentaries

Year	Documentary	Subject	Parts	Broadcast on	Awards
1983	''Just Another Day: Walton on the Naze''	Various long-standing British institutions.
1983	''The Tuesday Documentary: Trumpets and Typewriters''	The history of war correspondents.
1984	''Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster''.	The system-built housing of the 1960's.
1984	''Italians: Mayor of Montemilone''	With Dino Labriola
1984	''The Cost Of Treachery''	The Albanian Subversion, a 1949 plot in which the CIA and MI6 attempted to overthrow the Albanian government to weaken the Soviet Union. The counter-agent within the intelligence rank, Kim Philby.
1987	''40 Minutes: Bombay Hotel''	The luxurious Taj Mahal Palace & Tower in Mumbai, contrasted with the poverty of the slums of the city.
1988	''An Ocean Apart''	The process by which the United States was involved in the First World War.	Episode One: "Hats Off to Mr. Wilson".
1989	''40 Minutes: The Kingdom of Fun''	Documentary about the Metro Centre in Gateshead, developed by entrepreneur John Hall. The programme compares John Hall's plans to regenerate the North East, with those of T. Dan Smith.
1989	''Inside Story: The Road To Terror''	How the Iranian Revolution turned from idealism to terror. Draws parallels with the French Revolution two hundred years earlier.
1992			6
1995		The way that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used by politicians and others.	3
1996	''25 Million Pounds''	Nick Leeson and the collapse of Barings Bank.			San Francisco International Film Festival, 1998: Best Science and Nature Documentary
1997	''Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh''	The story, dating back to the 1950s, of the search for a cure to cancer and the impact of Henrietta Lacks, the "woman who will never die" because her cells never stopped reproducing.
1999	''The Mayfair Set''		4
2002	''The Century of the Self''	How Freud's discoveries concerning the unconscious led to Edward Bernays' development of public relations, the use of desire over need and self-actualisation as a means of achieving economic growth and the political control of population.	4	BBC Four, art house cinemas in the US	Broadcast Award: Best Documentary Series; Longman/History Today Awards: Historical Film of the Year; Entertainment Weekly, 2005: fourth best movie
2004	''The Power of Nightmares''	Suggested a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and Neoconservatism in the United States in that both needed to inflate a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them.	3	BBC Two
2007		The modern concept of freedom.	3	BBC Two
2007	—	Television news reporters.	1	Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, third episode of the fourth series
2009	—	The rise of "Oh Dear"-ism.	1	''Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe''
2009	''It Felt Like A Kiss''	Mixed media. Broadcast July 2.	1
2010	—	Paranoia and moral panics .	1	''Charlie Brooker's Newswipe'', fourth episode in the second series
2011		The computer as a model of the world around us.	3	BBC Two
2011	''Every Day Is Like Sunday'' (working title)	The dramatic downfall of the newspaper mogul, who used to dominate Britain before Rupert Murdoch arrived.	1

References

External links

"What's the big idea?", interview with Adam Curtis in the Guardian, May 2011

Adam Curtis's blog, BBC

Category:British journalists Category:British television producers Category:1955 births Category:British documentary filmmakers Category:Old Sennockians Category:Living people

ar:آدم كيرتز cs:Adam Curtis da:Adam Curtis de:Adam Curtis fr:Adam Curtis is:Adam Curtis nl:Adam Curtis no:Adam Curtis ro:Adam Curtis sv:Adam Curtis es:Adam Curtis

File:Derrick-Jensen.jpg Derrick Jensen (born December 19, 1960) is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing modern civilization and its values, including ''A Language Older Than Words'', ''The Culture of Make Believe'', and ''Endgame''. He holds a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.

Themes in Jensen's work

Jensen's work is sometimes characterized as anarcho-primitivist, although he has categorically rejected that label, describing primitivist as a "racist way to describe indigenous peoples". He prefers to be called "indigenist" or an "ally to the indigenous," because "indigenous peoples have had the only sustainable human social organizations, and... we need to recognize that we [colonizers] are all living on stolen land."

Jensen sees civilization to be inherently unsustainable and based on violence. He argues that the modern industrial economy is fundamentally at odds with healthy relationships, the natural environment, and indigenous peoples. He concludes that the very pervasiveness of these behaviors indicates that they are diagnostic symptoms of the greater problem of civilization itself. Accordingly, he exhorts readers and audiences to help bring an end to industrial civilization.

In ''A Language Older Than Words'' and also in an article entitled "Actions Speak Louder Than Words", Jensen states "Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I'm not sure that's right".

Jensen proposes that a different, harmonious way of life is possible, and that it can be seen in many societies including many Native American or other indigenous cultures. He claims that many indigenous peoples perceive a primary difference between Western and indigenous perspectives: even the most progressive Westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world works. Furthermore, these indigenous peoples understand the world as consisting of other beings with whom we can enter into relationship; this stands in contrast to the Western belief that the world consists of objects or resources to be exploited or used.

Writings

''A Language Older Than Words'' uses the lens of domestic violence to look at the larger violence of western culture. ''The Culture of Make Believe'' begins by exploring racism and misogyny and moves to examine how this culture’s economic system leads inevitably to hatred and atrocity. ''Strangely Like War'' is about deforestation. ''Walking on Water'' is about education (It begins: "As is true for most people I know, I’ve always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?"). ''Welcome to the Machine'' is about surveillance, and more broadly about science and what he perceives to be a Western obsession with control.

''Endgame'' is about what he describes as the inherent unsustainability of civilization. In this book he asks: "Do you believe that this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?" Nearly everyone he talks to says no. His next question is: "How would this understanding — that this culture will not voluntarily stop destroying the natural world, eliminating indigenous cultures, exploiting the poor, and killing those who resist — shift our strategy and tactics? The answer? Nobody knows, because we never talk about it: we’re too busy pretending the culture will undergo a magical transformation." ''Endgame'', he says, is "about that shift in strategy, and in tactics."

Jensen's writing uses the first-person and interweaves personal experiences with cited facts to construct arguments. His books are written like narratives, lacking a linear, hierarchical structure. They are not divided into distinct sections devoted to an individual argument. Instead, his writing is conversational, leaving one line of thought incomplete to move on to another, returning to the first again at some later point. Jensen uses this creative non-fiction style to combine his artistic voice with logical argument. Jensen often uses quotations as reference points for ideas explored in a chapter. (For example, he introduces the first chapter of ''Walking on Water'' with a quote from Jules Henry's book ''Culture Against Man''.)

Jensen wrote and Stephanie McMillan illustrated the graphic novels ''As the World Burns'' (2007) and ''Mischief in the Forest'' (2010).

''Resistance Against Empire'' consists of interviews with J. W. Smith (on poverty), Kevin Bales (on slavery), Anuradha Mittal (on hunger), Juliet Schor ('globalization' and environmental degradation), Ramsey Clark (on US 'defense'), Stephen Schwartz (editor of ''The Nonproliferation Review'', on nukes), Alfred McCoy (politics and heroin), Christian Parenti (the US prison system), Katherine Albrecht (on RFID), and Robert McChesney (on (freedom of) the media) conducted between 1999 and 2004.

Documentaries

Jensen was featured in the documentaries ''What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire'' (2007), ''Blind Spot'' (2008), ''First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture'' (2009), ''Call of Life'' (2010) and ''END:CIV'' (2011).

Awards and acclaim

2008: Named a “visionary” as one of Utne Reader magazine’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World.” 2008: Grand Prize winner, Eric Hoffer Book Award for ''Thought to Exist in the Wild'', Derrick Jensen, Photographs by Karen Tweedy-Holmes. 2006: Named "Person of the Year" by ''Press Action'' for the publication of ''Endgame''. 2003: ''The Culture of Make Believe'' was one of two finalists for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.

2000: Hackensack, NJ, Record declared ''A Language Older Than Words'' its best book of the year.

2000: ''Language'' was nominated for Quality Paperback Book Club's New Vision Award.

1998: Second Prize in the category of small budget non-profit advertisements, as determined by the Inland Northwest Ad Federation, for the first ad in the "National Forests: Your land, your choice" series.

1995: Critics' Choice for one of America's ten best nature books of 1995, for ''Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros''.

Published works

Books

1995, ''Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros'' (with George Draffan and John Osborn), Sierra Club Books, ISBN 0-87156-417-3 Republished 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 978-1931498562

1995, ''Railroads and Clearcuts: Legacy of Congress's 1864 Northern Pacific Railroad Land Grant'' (with George Draffan and John Osborn), Keokee Company Publishing, ISBN 1-879628-08-2

2000, ''A Language Older Than Words'', Context Books, ISBN 1-893956-03-2 Republished 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 978-1931498555

2002 ''The Culture of Make Believe'', New York: Context Books, ISBN 1-893956-28-8 Republished 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 978-1931498579

2003, ''Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests'' (with George Draffan), Chelsea Green, ISBN 978-1931498456

2004, ''Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control'' (with George Draffan), Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 1-931498-52-0

2005, ''Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution'', Chelsea Green, ISBN 978-1931498784

2006, ''Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization'', Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1-58322-730-X

2006, ''Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance'', Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1-58322-724-5

2007, ''Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos'' (with Karen Tweedy-Holmes), No Voice Unheard, ISBN 978-0972838719

2007, ''As the World Burns: 50 Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial'' (with Stephanie McMillan), Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1-58322-777-6

2008, ''How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization'', PM Press, ISBN 978-1604860030

2009, ''What We Leave Behind'' (with Aric McBay), Seven Stories Press, ISBN 978-1583228678

2009, ''Songs of the Dead'', PM Press, ISBN 978-1604860443

2010, ''Lives Less Valuable'', PM Press, ISBN 978-1604860450

2010, ''Resistance Against Empire'', PM Press, ISBN 978-1-60486-046-7

2010, ''Mischief in the Forest: A Yarn Yarn'' (with Stephanie McMillan), PM Press, ISBN 978-1604860818

2011, ''Dreams'', Seven Stories Press, ISBN 978-1-58322-930-9

2011, ''Deep Green Resistance'' (with Lierre Keith and Aric McBay), Seven Stories Press, ISBN 978-1-58322-929-3

2011 (forthcoming), ''Truths Among Us: Conversations on Building a New Culture'', PM Press, ISBN 978-1604862997

Spoken word on CD

Derrick Jensen ''Standup Tragedy'' (live double CD), 2002

---- ''The Other Side of Darkness'' (live CD), 2004

---- ''Now This War Has Two Sides'' (live CD), PM Press, 2008

See also

Deep Green Resistance

Lierre Keith

John Zerzan

Kevin Tucker

Wolfi Landstreicher

Deep Ecology

Anarcho-Primitivism

References

External links

Official personal website

END:CIV - Documentary centered around Derrick Jensen's work

The website for Jensen's book ''Endgame'', which includes numerous online excerpts

Jesus Radicals' New Review of Endgame, Vol. 1

A Talk given by Derrick Jensen at The Santa Cruz Vets Hall on 03-29-06

A Conversation with Derrick Jensen, published in Black Oak Presents, Summer 2008

Conversation with Derrick Jensen, published in ascent magazine, summer 2008

An interview with Derrick Jensen in NoCompromise.org

Contribution to HopeDance Magazine

Earth: A Wake-up Call for Obama Nation, April 25, 2009 Speaking Event, Arlington, VA

Jensen: "The Dominant Culture is Killing the Planet" - video interview by ''Democracy Now!''

Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:American anarchists Category:American environmentalists Category:American feminist writers Category:American non-fiction environmental writers Category:American novelists Category:Colorado School of Mines alumni Category:Eastern Washington University alumni Category:Green anarchists Category:Post-left anarchists

da:Derrick Jensen de:Derrick Jensen es:Derrick Jensen fr:Derrick Jensen ko:데릭 젠슨 no:Derrick Jensen sv:Derrick Jensen