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" "But freedom without law is freedom only for the strong at the expense of the weak. Freedom without law is therefore no freedom, but rather anarchy or tyranny. Law is the bond of all civil society. We are not asking a favour of a man when we ask him to obey the law. Obedience of the rule of law is necessary for the continuance of liberty itself. Doubtless you will point out that laws have not always been just—indeed they have been very unjust. In South Africa that certainly has been the case. Thankfully, that is now being remedied. And alongside that, democracy has yet to be achieved.
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British politician and stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. As prime minister, she implemented neoliberal economic policies of deregulation and privatization that became known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Not the least of those opponents was Jacques Delors. By the summer of 1988 he had altogether slipped his leash as a fonctionnaire and become a fully fledged political spokesman for federalism. The blurring of the roles of civil servants and elected representatives was more in the continental tradition than in ours. It proceeded from the widespread distrust which their voters had for politicians in countries like France and Italy. That same distrust also fuelled the federalist express. If you have no real confidence in the political system or political leaders of your own country you are bound to be more tolerant of foreigners of manifest intelligence, ability and integrity like M. Delors telling you how to run your affairs. Or to put it more bluntly, if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too. But the mood in Britain was different. I sensed it. More than that, I shared it and I decided that the time had come to strike out against what I saw as the erosion of democracy by centralization and bureaucracy, and to set out an alternative view of Europe's future.
The freedom of peoples depends fundamentally on the rule of law, a fair legal system. The place to have trials or accusations is a court of law, the Common Law that has come right up from Magna Carta, which has come right up through the British courts – a court of law is the place where you deal with these matters. If you ever get trial by television or guilt by accusation, that day freedom dies because you have not had it done with all of the careful rules that have developed in a court of law. Press and television rely on freedom. Those who rely on freedom must uphold the rule of law and have a duty and a responsibility to do so and not try to substitute their own system for it.
Today we are coming to realise that an epoch in history is over...For more than forty years that Iron Curtain remained in place. Few of us expected to see it lifted in our life-time. Yet with great suddenness the impossible has happened. Communism is broken, utterly broken...We do not see this new Soviet Union as an enemy, but as a country groping its way towards freedom. We no longer have to view the world through a prism of East-West relations. The Cold War is over.