Word: thatcherism
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...musicals come. Based on the 2000 movie about a boy from the coal country of northern England who discovers his talent for dance, the musical is rooted in a time and place that have little resonance for Americans: the coal miners' strike of 1984-85, provoked by the Conservative Thatcher government's efforts to dismantle the country's nationalized coal industry. For an American theatergoer in London, the accents are tough, the palette dark and the inspirational story grounded in a glum, and very English, working-class setting...
...songs too - good ones by Elton John, with lyrics by Lee Hall, who wrote the original film - but they are so tightly woven into the action that you almost hate to single them out. There are anthem-like chorus numbers and vaudeville throwbacks, political drinking songs ("Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher") and those with simple, John Lennon-like lyricism. But all of them seem utterly fresh and inseparable from the story they enliven and enhance. The show's centerpiece, of course, is Billy's dancing, which ranges from tap numbers to classical ballet, as well as a striking Act I finale...
...known as the H-Blocks, Long Kesh, the Cages, Thatcher's Breakers Yard. Northern Ireland's notorious Maze prison drew more grim nicknames - and housed more paramilitary prisoners - than any other jail in Western Europe. Its last inmates were released under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which laid the foundation for an end to sectarian violence in the British province. And after bulldozers razed most of the former prison buildings last year, the site where Bobby Sands and nine other Republican militants died in a hunger strike in 1981 became little more than an abandoned relic...
...doesn’t always work. In the British election of 1992, Neil Kinnock ran a similar campaign and lost narrowly to a post-Thatcher Conservative Party which had been in power for 13 years. John Major, who won, succeeded in distancing himself from Mrs. Thatcher, who by then had become unpopular both inside and outside her party, particularly over the issue of greater ties with Europe. Similarly, John McCain has attempted to move away from the Bush administration...
...during Blair's final term, also suggested the Tories were in the clear. "We are not talking about corruption here. We are not talking about law-breaking," said Wright. This was about "a massive misjudgment." Or, as Lord Tebbit, former chairman of the Conservative party and one of Margaret Thatcher's most loyal Cabinet members tartly observed, "if you sleep with dogs, you will get fleas...