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 20^th 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 - ) — 40^th president of the USA1981-1989,aRepublican;

Bush, George Herbert Walk­er (1924 - ) — 41^st 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.