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MARGARET THATCHER 1925 – 2013

Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born on October 13, 1925. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, reshaped the image of her country’s Conservative party.
Born Margaret Hilda Roberts in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where her father was mayor, she studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford (B.A., 1946; B.Sc., 1949; M.A.*, 1950), where she became the first woman president of the Oxford University Conservative Association.
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*B. A . — Bachelor of Arts; B. Sc — Bachelor of Science; M. A. — Master of Arts.
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She subsequently worked as a research chemist. Her marriage to a prosperous businessman Denis Thatcher in 1951 also enabled her to read for the bar, and she specialized in tax law. In 1953, she became an attorney specializing in tax law.
A Conservative party activist, Thatcher first stood for Parliament in 1950 but was unsuccessful, despite increasing the local Conservative vote by 50 per cent. Not until 1959, when she was selected to fight the relatively “safe” Conservative constituency of Finchley, in north London, did she enter Parliament. She was joint parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (1961-1964) and secretary of state for education and science (only the second woman ever to become a Conservative cabinet minister) under Prime Minister Edward Heath (1970-1774). Thatcher succeeded Heath* as Conservative leader in 1975 after the party’s loss of two general elections in 1974.
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*Heath, Edward (Richard George) (1916 - ) — British Conservative politician, party leader 1965-1975. As prime minister 1970-1974 he took up the UK into the European Community.
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The Conservatives’ decisive victory in the general elections of 1979, which elevated her to the prime ministry, was thought partly to have resulted from her denunciation of trade-union-induced chaos in the previous winter’s strikes.
Thatcher was seen as belonging to the newly energetic right wing of the Conservative Party, who during her administration became known as “Dries”, as opposed to the old-style, liberal Tories, known as “Wets”. She advocated greater independence of the individual from the state, an end to allegedly excessive government interference in the economy, and reductions in both public expenditures (enabling personal taxes to be cut) and the printing of money (reflecting the policy known as monetarism). But unemployment, which had been rising mildly throughout the late 1970s, nearly tripled during her first two terms—from 1,100,000 to 3,000,000—and her term in office saw the growth of a substantial underclass. Moreover, business losses and bankruptcies increased during the austerity that accompanied her administration’s policies for reducing inflation.
Though the Conservative Party’s parliamentary majority was large, it won with only a little over 40 percent of the vote in 1987; that figure reflected the lowest share of the vote for the Conservatives since 1922. Abroad, Thatcher presided over the orderly establishment of an independent Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) in 1980 after 15 years of illegal separation from British colonial rule under a white minority. In 1982 Britain successfully recaptured the Falkland Islands following a 10-week Argentine occupation. The electorate’s memories of Thatcher’s decisive leadership during the Falklands conflict helped give her a landslide victory in the general elections of June 1983.
Throughout her terms Thatcher pursued the policies that earned her the appellation of “Iron Lady”: strict dominance over the ministers of her cabinet; pursuance of a strong monetarist policy; increased subjection of trade unions to legal constraints; and “privatization” of state-owned enterprises. In her later years she extended her “Thatcher revolution” from the economics of finance and industry into new areas of social policy, through the further privatization of education, health care, and housing. She said she wanted to return to Victorian values. In many respects the country has. She affirmed Britain’s strong commitment to NATO and Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, a stance that proved popular with the electorate, given the Labour Party’s repudiation of Britain’s traditional nuclear and defense policies. She also continued to support the retention of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, although a terrorist bombing in Brighton, Sussex, in 1984, allegedly the work of Irish separatists, nearly succeeded in killing her and several senior members of her administration. A split in Tory ranks over her policy regarding European monetary and political integration led to her resignation from party leadership late in 1990. Not without reason she was called the Iron Lady.
Proud of her middle-class, nonconformist, small-town background, Thatcher extolled the virtues of freedom, hard work, thrift, and personal responsibility, and had a strong dislike for socialism. As prime minister she rejected the welfare-state policies followed for decades by both Labourites and Conservatives, promoting a free-enterprise economy, tight monetary policies to control inflation, lower taxes, reduced government spending, privatization of nationalized industries and public housing, and restrictions on trade unions. Firmly committed to the Western alliance, she strengthened British defences and had close ties with U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush*.
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* Reagan, Ronald (Wilson) ( 1911 - ) — 40th president of the USA1981-1989,aRepublican;
Bush, George Herbert Walker (1924 - ) — 41st president of the USA1989-1993, aRepublican.
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In 1982, she successfully pursued a war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.
Most significant is Thatcher’s creation of a new breed of Briton. Seizing upon the driving forces of greed and selfishness Thatcher has, deliberately or not, appealed to many voters for the simple reason that they feel they have more to gain under the Conservative rule.
Budgests throughout the 1980s have whittled down income tax, and state-owned facilities such as water and British Gas have been handed over the voters with council houses.
Thatcher’s popularity has been built from people wanting more money in their pockets, more home ownership, more of everything.
Thatcherism gave birth to a new class drawn from a cross section of other classes, backgrounds and educations. The 1980s was the time when half the nation woke up and started to feel better. She was a great leader in terms of achieving what she set out to do.
Early in 1990, Thatcher created a furor with her unpopular community charge, or “poll tax”, levied equally on all citizens for the support of local government. In the autumn she provoked a rebellion in her own party because of her opposition to full British participation in a European monetary system and was forced to resign as prime minister (November 1990). She was succeeded as party leader and prime minister by her protege John Major*.
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*Major, John (1943 -) — British Conservative leader, prime-minister 1990-1997.
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In 1990 Thatcher received the Order of Merit. In June 1992, she was raised to the peerage as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Her Memoirs, The Downing Street Years, were published in 1993.