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On April 8, 2013, Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister from 1979-1990 died at the age of 87. From the article:
"Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. During her time in office, she reduced the influence of trade unions, privatized certain industries, scaled back public benefits and changed the terms of political debate, much like her friend and ideological ally, U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Nicknamed the “Iron Lady,” she opposed Soviet communism and fought a war to maintain control of the Falkland Islands. The longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, Thatcher was eventually pressured into resigning by members of her own Conservative Party.
Margaret Thatcher: Childhood and Education
Margaret Hilda Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, was born on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, a small town in Lincolnshire, England. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice, were middle-class shopkeepers and devout Methodists. Alfred was also a politician, serving as a town council member for 16 years before becoming an alderman in 1943 and mayor of Grantham from 1945 to 1946.
Thatcher matriculated at Oxford University in 1943, during the height of World War II. While there she studied chemistry and joined the Oxford Union Conservative Association, becoming president of the organization in 1946. After graduation she worked as a research chemist, but her real interest was politics. In 1950 she ran for parliament in the Labour-dominated constituency of Dartford, using the slogan “Vote Right to Keep What’s Left.” She lost that year and again in 1951, but received more votes than previous Conservative Party candidates.
Margaret Thatcher Enters Parliament
In December 1951 Margaret married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman. Less than two years later she gave birth to twins, Carol and Mark. Meanwhile, she was studying for the bar exams, which she passed in early 1954. She then spent the next few years practicing law and looking for a winnable constituency.
Thatcher ran for parliament once more in 1959—this time in the Conservative-dominated constituency of Finchley—and easily won the seat. The first bill she introduced affirmed the right of the media to cover local government meetings. Speaking about the bill in her maiden speech, she focused not on freedom of the press but instead on the need to limit wasteful government expenditures—a common theme throughout her political career.
By 1961 Thatcher had accepted an invitation to become parliamentary undersecretary in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. She then steadily moved up the ministerial ranks, becoming secretary of state for education and science when the Conservatives retook power in 1970. The following year she was demonized by her Labour Party opponents as “Thatcher the milk snatcher” when she eliminated a free milk program for schoolchildren. Nonetheless, she was able to keep her job, and in 1975, with the Conservatives back in the opposition, she defeated former Prime Minister Edward Heath to take over leadership of the party.
Margaret Thatcher Becomes First Female Prime Minister
Thatcher was now one of the most powerful women in the world. She rejected the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated deficit spending during periods of high unemployment, instead preferring the monetarist approach of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. At her first conference speech, she chastised the Labour Party on economic grounds, saying, “A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master—these are the British inheritance.” Soon after, she attacked the Soviet Union as “bent on world dominance.” A Soviet army newspaper responded by calling her “the Iron Lady,” a nickname she immediately embraced.
The Conservatives, helped out by a “winter of discontent” in which numerous unions went on strike, won the 1979 election, and Thatcher became prime minister. During her first term, the government lowered direct taxes while increasing taxes on spending, sold off public housing, put in austerity measures and made other reforms, even as rising inflation and unemployment caused Thatcher’s popularity to temporarily wane.
In April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a sparsely populated British colony located 300 miles from Argentina and 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom. Thatcher dispatched troops to the area. On May 2, a British submarine controversially sank an Argentine cruiser that was outside of an official exclusion zone, killing over 300 people on board. Later in the month, British troops landed near San Carlos Bay in East Falkland and, despite persistent air attacks, were able to capture the capital of Port Stanley and end the fighting.
Margaret Thatcher's Second Term
The war and an improving economy propelled Thatcher to a second term in 1983. This time around, her government took on the trade unions, requiring them to hold a secret ballot before any work stoppage and refusing to make any concessions during a yearlong miners’ strike. In what became a key part of her legacy, Thatcher also privatized British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, Rolls-Royce and a number of other state-owned companies.
On the foreign policy front, Thatcher often found herself allied with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, whom she later described as “the supreme architect of the West’s Cold War victory.” Her relationship with her own continent’s leaders was more complicated, particularly since she believed the Europe Union should be a free-trade area rather than a political endeavor.
“That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era,” she wrote in her 2002 book Statecraft. In Asia, meanwhile, she negotiated the eventual transfer of Hong Kong to the Chinese. In Africa she had a mixed record, facilitating the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe but opposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
Margaret Thatcher’s Fall From Power and Death
After Thatcher was elected to a third term in 1987, her government lowered income tax rates to a postwar low. It also pushed through an unpopular “community charge” that was met with street protests and high levels of nonpayment. On November 14, 1990, former Defense Minister Michael Heseltine challenged her for leadership of the party, partly due to differences of opinion on the European Union.
Thatcher won the first ballot but by too small of a margin for outright victory. That night, her cabinet members visited her one by one and urged her to resign. She officially stepped down on November 28 after helping to assure that John Major and not Heseltine would replace her.
Thatcher remained in parliament until 1992, at which time she entered the largely ceremonial House of Lords and began to write her memoirs. Though she stopped appearing in public after suffering a series of small strokes in the early 2000s, her influence remained strong. In 2011, the former prime minister was the subject of an award-winning (and controversial) biographical film, “The Iron Lady,” which depicted her political rise and fall.
Margaret Thatcher died on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SPC Woody Bullard 1SG Steven Imerman merman SFC William Farrell Lt Col Charlie Brown Col Carl Whicker SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth SP5 Geoffrey Vannerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown SGT (Join to see) Maj William W. 'Bill' Price PO1 H Gene Lawrence SGT John " Mac " McConnell LTC Wayne Brandon PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SPC Douglas Bolton PVT Mark Zehner
"Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. During her time in office, she reduced the influence of trade unions, privatized certain industries, scaled back public benefits and changed the terms of political debate, much like her friend and ideological ally, U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Nicknamed the “Iron Lady,” she opposed Soviet communism and fought a war to maintain control of the Falkland Islands. The longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, Thatcher was eventually pressured into resigning by members of her own Conservative Party.
Margaret Thatcher: Childhood and Education
Margaret Hilda Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, was born on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, a small town in Lincolnshire, England. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice, were middle-class shopkeepers and devout Methodists. Alfred was also a politician, serving as a town council member for 16 years before becoming an alderman in 1943 and mayor of Grantham from 1945 to 1946.
Thatcher matriculated at Oxford University in 1943, during the height of World War II. While there she studied chemistry and joined the Oxford Union Conservative Association, becoming president of the organization in 1946. After graduation she worked as a research chemist, but her real interest was politics. In 1950 she ran for parliament in the Labour-dominated constituency of Dartford, using the slogan “Vote Right to Keep What’s Left.” She lost that year and again in 1951, but received more votes than previous Conservative Party candidates.
Margaret Thatcher Enters Parliament
In December 1951 Margaret married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman. Less than two years later she gave birth to twins, Carol and Mark. Meanwhile, she was studying for the bar exams, which she passed in early 1954. She then spent the next few years practicing law and looking for a winnable constituency.
Thatcher ran for parliament once more in 1959—this time in the Conservative-dominated constituency of Finchley—and easily won the seat. The first bill she introduced affirmed the right of the media to cover local government meetings. Speaking about the bill in her maiden speech, she focused not on freedom of the press but instead on the need to limit wasteful government expenditures—a common theme throughout her political career.
By 1961 Thatcher had accepted an invitation to become parliamentary undersecretary in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. She then steadily moved up the ministerial ranks, becoming secretary of state for education and science when the Conservatives retook power in 1970. The following year she was demonized by her Labour Party opponents as “Thatcher the milk snatcher” when she eliminated a free milk program for schoolchildren. Nonetheless, she was able to keep her job, and in 1975, with the Conservatives back in the opposition, she defeated former Prime Minister Edward Heath to take over leadership of the party.
Margaret Thatcher Becomes First Female Prime Minister
Thatcher was now one of the most powerful women in the world. She rejected the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated deficit spending during periods of high unemployment, instead preferring the monetarist approach of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. At her first conference speech, she chastised the Labour Party on economic grounds, saying, “A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master—these are the British inheritance.” Soon after, she attacked the Soviet Union as “bent on world dominance.” A Soviet army newspaper responded by calling her “the Iron Lady,” a nickname she immediately embraced.
The Conservatives, helped out by a “winter of discontent” in which numerous unions went on strike, won the 1979 election, and Thatcher became prime minister. During her first term, the government lowered direct taxes while increasing taxes on spending, sold off public housing, put in austerity measures and made other reforms, even as rising inflation and unemployment caused Thatcher’s popularity to temporarily wane.
In April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a sparsely populated British colony located 300 miles from Argentina and 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom. Thatcher dispatched troops to the area. On May 2, a British submarine controversially sank an Argentine cruiser that was outside of an official exclusion zone, killing over 300 people on board. Later in the month, British troops landed near San Carlos Bay in East Falkland and, despite persistent air attacks, were able to capture the capital of Port Stanley and end the fighting.
Margaret Thatcher's Second Term
The war and an improving economy propelled Thatcher to a second term in 1983. This time around, her government took on the trade unions, requiring them to hold a secret ballot before any work stoppage and refusing to make any concessions during a yearlong miners’ strike. In what became a key part of her legacy, Thatcher also privatized British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, Rolls-Royce and a number of other state-owned companies.
On the foreign policy front, Thatcher often found herself allied with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, whom she later described as “the supreme architect of the West’s Cold War victory.” Her relationship with her own continent’s leaders was more complicated, particularly since she believed the Europe Union should be a free-trade area rather than a political endeavor.
“That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era,” she wrote in her 2002 book Statecraft. In Asia, meanwhile, she negotiated the eventual transfer of Hong Kong to the Chinese. In Africa she had a mixed record, facilitating the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe but opposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
Margaret Thatcher’s Fall From Power and Death
After Thatcher was elected to a third term in 1987, her government lowered income tax rates to a postwar low. It also pushed through an unpopular “community charge” that was met with street protests and high levels of nonpayment. On November 14, 1990, former Defense Minister Michael Heseltine challenged her for leadership of the party, partly due to differences of opinion on the European Union.
Thatcher won the first ballot but by too small of a margin for outright victory. That night, her cabinet members visited her one by one and urged her to resign. She officially stepped down on November 28 after helping to assure that John Major and not Heseltine would replace her.
Thatcher remained in parliament until 1992, at which time she entered the largely ceremonial House of Lords and began to write her memoirs. Though she stopped appearing in public after suffering a series of small strokes in the early 2000s, her influence remained strong. In 2011, the former prime minister was the subject of an award-winning (and controversial) biographical film, “The Iron Lady,” which depicted her political rise and fall.
Margaret Thatcher died on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SPC Woody Bullard 1SG Steven Imerman merman SFC William Farrell Lt Col Charlie Brown Col Carl Whicker SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth SP5 Geoffrey Vannerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown SGT (Join to see) Maj William W. 'Bill' Price PO1 H Gene Lawrence SGT John " Mac " McConnell LTC Wayne Brandon PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SPC Douglas Bolton PVT Mark Zehner
Margaret Thatcher
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Why Margaret Thatcher Became The Most Controversial Figure Of The 80s | The Iron Lady | Timeline
Margaret Thatcher - The Iron Lady is the first major documentary to look back on the development and impact of this remarkable woman, whom commentators of bo...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on April 8, 2013 British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC who was "Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. died at the age of 87
Why Margaret Thatcher Became The Most Controversial Figure Of The 80s | The Iron Lady | Timeline
Margaret Thatcher - The Iron Lady is the first major documentary to look back on the development and impact of this remarkable woman, whom commentators of both the political left and right agree changed the face of 20th Century politics forever. Featuring many excerpts from her powerful speeches and insightful contributions from her political supporters and detractors, a portrait emerges of a woman whose strength of conviction eventually became her weakness.
https://youtu.be/3A6l60knEzI?t=42
Images
1. Margaret Thatcher & Gorbachev at RAF Brize Norton, 7 December 1987
2. Margaret Thatcher at a friend's house, summer 1935.
3. The Thatcher family – Denis, Margaret and twins, Mark and Carol.
4. Margaret Thatcher in her mid-twenties
Background from {[https://www.margaretthatcher.org/essential/biography]}
"Margaret Thatcher's political career has been one of the most remarkable of modern times. Born in October 1925 at Grantham, a small market town in eastern England, she rose to become the first (and for two decades the only) woman to lead a major Western democracy. She won three successive General Elections and served as British Prime Minister for more than eleven years (1979-90), a record unmatched in the twentieth century.
During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination.
In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill.
By successfully shifting British economic and foreign policy to the right, her governments helped to encourage wider international trends which broadened and deepened during the 1980s and 1990s, as the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, and the growth of free markets strengthened political and economic freedom in every continent.
Margaret Thatcher became one of the world's most influential and respected political leaders, as well as one of the most controversial, dynamic, and plain-spoken, a reference point for friends and enemies alike.
1925-1947: GRANTHAM & OXFORD
Margaret Thatcher's home and early life in Grantham played a large part in forming her political convictions. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, were Methodists. The social life of the family was lived largely within the close community of the local congregation, bounded by strong traditions of self-help, charitable work, and personal truthfulness.
The Roberts family ran a grocery business, bringing up their two daughters in a flat over the shop. Margaret Roberts attended a local state school and from there won a place at Oxford, where she studied chemistry at Somerville College (1943-47). Her tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a pioneer of X-ray crystallography who won a Nobel Prize in 1964. Her outlook was profoundly influenced by her scientific training.
But chemistry took second place to politics in Margaret Thatcher's future plans. Conservative politics had always been a feature of her home life: her father was a local councillor in Grantham and talked through with her the issues of the day. She was elected president of the student Conservative Association at Oxford and met many prominent politicians, making herself known to the leadership of her party at the time of its devastating defeat by Labour at the General Election of 1945.
1950-1951: CANDIDATE FOR DARTFORD
In her mid-twenties she ran as the Conservative candidate for the strong Labour seat of Dartford at the General Elections of 1950 and 1951, winning national publicity as the youngest woman candidate in the country.
She lost both times, but cut the Labour majority sharply and hugely enjoyed the experience of campaigning. Aspects of her mature political style were formed in Dartford, a largely working class constituency which suffered as much as any from post-war rationing and shortages, as well as the rising level of taxation and state regulation. Unlike many Conservatives at that time, she had little difficulty getting a hearing from any audience and she spoke easily, with force and confidence, on issues that mattered to the voters.
1951-1970: FAMILY & CAREER
It was in Dartford too that she met her husband, Denis Thatcher, a local businessman who ran his family's firm before becoming an executive in the oil industry. They married in 1951. Twins — Mark and Carol —were born to the couple in 1953.
In the 1950s Margaret Thatcher trained as a lawyer, specialising in taxation. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 as Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley, a north London constituency, which she continued to represent until she was made a member of the House of Lords (as Baroness Thatcher) in 1992. Within two years, she was given junior office in the administration of Harold Macmillan and during 1964-70 (when the Conservatives were again in Opposition), established her place among the senior figures of the party, serving continuously as a shadow minister. When the Conservatives returned to office in 1970, under the premiership of Edward Heath, she achieved cabinet rank as Education Secretary.
1970-1974: EDUCATION MINISTER
Margaret Thatcher had a rough ride as Education Minister. The early 1970s saw student radicalism at its height and British politics at its least civil. Protesters disrupted her speeches, the opposition press vilified her, and education policy itself seemed set immovably in a leftwards course, which she and many Conservatives found uncomfortable. But she mastered the job and was toughened by the experience.
The Heath Government itself took a beating from events during its tenure (1970-74) and disappointed many. Elected on promises of economic revival through taming the trade unions and introducing more free market policies, it executed a series of policy reverses — nicknamed the 'U turns' — to become one of the most interventionist governments in British history, negotiating with the unions to introduce detailed control of wages, prices, and dividends. Defeated at a General Election in February 1974, the Heath Government left a legacy of inflation and industrial strife.
1975: ELECTED CONSERVATIVE LEADER
Many Conservatives were ready for a new approach after the Heath Government and when the Party lost a second General Election in October 1974, Margaret Thatcher ran against Heath for the leadership. To general surprise (her own included), in February 1975 she defeated him on the first ballot and won the contest outright on the second, though challenged by half a dozen senior colleagues. She became the first woman ever to lead a Western political party and to serve as Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons.
1975-1979: LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION
The Labour Government of 1974-79 was one of the most crisis-prone in British history, leading the country to a state of virtual bankruptcy in 1976 when a collapse in the value of the currency on the foreign exchanges forced the government to negotiate credit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF imposed tight expenditure controls on the government as a condition of the loan, which, ironically, improved Labour's public standing. By summer 1978, it even looked possible that it might win re-election.
But over the winter of 1978/79, Labour's luck ran out. Trade union pay demands led to an epidemic of strikes and showed that the government had little influence over its allies in the labour movement. Public opinion swung against Labour and the Conservatives won a Parliamentary majority of 43 at the General Election of May 1979. The following day, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
1979-1983: PRIME MINISTER – FIRST TERM
The new government pledged to check and reverse Britain's economic decline. In the short-term, painful measures were required. Although direct taxes were cut, to restore incentives, the budget had to be balanced, and so indirect taxes were increased. The economy was already entering a recession, but inflation was rising and interest rates had to be raised to control it. By the end of Margaret Thatcher's first term, unemployment in Britain was more than three million and it began to fall only in 1986. A large section of Britain's inefficient manufacturing industry closed down. No one had predicted how severe the downturn would be.
But vital long-term gains were made. Inflation was checked and the government created the expectation that it would do whatever was necessary to keep it low. The budget of spring 1981, increasing taxes at the lowest point of the recession, offended conventional Keynesian economic thinking, but it made possible a cut in interest rates and demonstrated this newly found determination. Economic recovery started in the same quarter and eight years of growth followed.
Political support flowed from this achievement, but the re-election of the government was only made certain by an unpredicted event: the Falklands War. The Argentine Junta's invasion of the islands in April 1982 was met by Margaret Thatcher in the firmest way and with a sure touch. Although she worked with the US administration in pursuing the possibility of a diplomatic solution, a British military Task Force was despatched to retake the islands. When diplomacy failed, military action was quickly successful and the Falklands were back under British control by June 1982.
The electorate was impressed. Few British or European leaders would have fought for the islands. By doing so, Margaret Thatcher laid the foundation for a much more vigorous and independent British foreign policy during the rest of the 1980s.When the General Election came in June 1983, the government was re-elected with its Parliamentary majority more than trebled (144 seats).
1983-1987: PRIME MINISTER – SECOND TERM
The second term opened with almost as many difficulties as the first. The government found itself challenged by the miners' union, which fought a year-long strike in 1984-85 under militant leadership. The labour movement as a whole put up bitter resistance to the government's trade union reforms, which began with legislation in 1980 and 1982 and continued after the General Election.
The miners' strike was one of the most violent and long lasting in British history. The outcome was uncertain, but after many turns in the road, the union was defeated. This proved a crucial development, because it ensured that the Thatcher reforms would endure. In the years that followed, the Labour Opposition quietly accepted the popularity and success of the trade union legislation and pledged not to reverse its key components.
In October 1984, when the strike was still underway, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempted to murder Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet by bombing her hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party annual conference. Although she survived unhurt, some of her closest colleagues were among the injured and dead and the room next to hers was severely damaged. No twentieth-century British Prime Minister ever came closer to assassination.
British policy in Northern Ireland had been a standing source of conflict for every Prime Minister since 1969, but Margaret Thatcher aroused the IRA's special hatred for her refusal to meet their political demands, notably during the 1980-81 prison hunger strikes.
Her policy throughout was implacably hostile to terrorism, republican or loyalist, although she matched that stance by negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 with the Republic of Ireland. The Agreement was an attempt to improve security cooperation between Britain and Ireland and to give some recognition to the political outlook of Catholics in Northern Ireland, an initiative which won warm endorsement from the Reagan administration and the US Congress.
The economy continued to improve during the 1983-87 Parliament and the policy of economic liberalisation was extended. The government began to pursue a policy of selling state assets, which in total had amounted to more than 20 per cent of the economy when the Conservatives came to power in 1979. The British privatisations of the 1980s were the first of their kind and proved influential across the world.
Where possible, sale of state assets took place through offering shares to the public, with generous terms for small investors. The Thatcher Governments presided over a great increase in the number of people saving through the stock market. They also encouraged people to buy their own homes and to make private pension provision, policies which over time have greatly increased the personal wealth of the British population.
The left wing of the Conservative Party had always been uneasy with its chief. In January 1986, enduring divisions between left and right in the Thatcher Cabinet were publicly exposed by the sudden resignation of the Defence Minister, Michael Heseltine, in a dispute over the business troubles of the British helicopter manufacturer, Westland. The fallout from the 'Westland Affair' challenged Margaret Thatcher's leadership as never before. She survived the crisis, but its effects were significant. She was subjected to heavy criticism within her own party for the decision to allow US warplanes to fly from British bases to attack targets in Libya (April 1986).There was talk of the government and of its leader being 'tired', of having gone on too long.
Her response was characteristic: at the Conservative Party's annual conference in October 1986, her speech foreshadowed a mass of reforms for a third Thatcher Government.With the economy now very strong, prospects were good for an election and the government was returned with a Parliamentary majority of 101in June 1987.
1987-1990:
Margaret Thatcher & Gorbachev at RAF Brize Norton, 7 December 1987.
The legislative platform of the third-term Thatcher Government was among the most ambitious ever put forward by a British administration. There were measures to reform the education system (1988), introducing a national curriculum for the first time. There was a new tax system for local government (1989), the Community Charge, or 'poll tax' as it was dubbed by opponents. And there was legislation to separate purchasers and providers within the National Health Service (1990), opening up the service to a measure of competition for the first time and increasing the scope for effective management.
All three measures were deeply controversial. The Community Charge, in particular, became a serious political problem, as local councils took advantage of the introduction of a new system to increase tax rates, blaming the increase on the Thatcher Government.(The system was abandoned by Margaret Thatcher's successor, John Major, in 1991.) By contrast, the education and health reforms proved enduring. Successive governments built on the achievement and in some respects extended their scope.
The economy boomed in 1987-88, but also began to overheat. Interest rates had to be doubled during 1988. A division within the government over management of the currency emerged into the open, Margaret Thatcher strongly opposing the policy urged by her Chancellor of the Exchequer and others, of pegging the pound sterling to the Deutschmark through the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). In the process, her relations with her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, were fatally damaged, and he resigned in October 1989.
Behind this dispute there was profound disagreement within the government over policy towards the European Community itself. The Prime Minister found herself increasingly at odds with her Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, on all questions touching European integration. Her speech at Bruges in September 1988 began the process by which the Conservative Party — at one time largely 'pro-European' — became predominantly 'Euro-sceptic'.
Paradoxically, all this took place against a backdrop of international events profoundly helpful to the Conservative cause. Margaret Thatcher played her part in the last phase of the Cold War, both in the strengthening of the Western alliance against the Soviets in the early 1980s and in the successful unwinding of the conflict later in the decade.
The Soviets had dubbed her the 'Iron Lady' — a tag she relished — for the tough line she took against them in speeches shortly after becoming Conservative leader in 1975. During the 1980s she offered strong support to the defence policies of the Reagan administration.
But when Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as a potential leader of the Soviet Union, she invited him to Britain in December 1984 and pronounced him a man she could do business with.She did not soften her criticisms of the Soviet system, making use of new opportunities to broadcast to television audiences in the east to put the case against Communism.Nevertheless, she played a constructive part in the diplomacy that smoothed the break-up of the Soviet Empire and of the Soviet Union itself in the years 1989-91.
By late 1990, the Cold War was over and free markets and institutions vindicated. But that event triggered the next stage in European integration, as France revived the project of a single European currency, hoping to check the power of a reunited Germany. As a result, divisions over European policy within the British Government were deepened by the end of the Cold War and now became acute.
On November 1 1990 Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned over Europe and in a bitter resignation speech precipitated a challenge to Margaret Thatcher's leadership of her party by Michael Heseltine. In the ballot that followed, she won a majority of the vote. Yet under party rules the margin was insufficient, and a second ballot was required. Receiving the news at a conference in Paris, she immediately announced her intention to fight on.
But a political earthquake occurred the next day on her return to London, when many colleagues in her cabinet — unsympathetic to her on Europe and doubting that she could win a fourth General Election — abruptly deserted her leadership and left her no choice but to withdraw. She resigned as Prime Minister on November 28 1990. John Major succeeded her and served in the post until the landslide election of Tony Blair's Labour Government in May 1997.
Chronology for 1987-1990 |
BIOGRAPHY: CONCLUSION
After 1990 Lady Thatcher (as she became) remained a potent political figure. She wrote two best-selling volumes of memoirs - The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995) - while continuing for a full decade to tour the world as a lecturer. A book of reflections on international politics - Statecraft - was published in 2002. During the period she made some important interventions in domestic British politics, notably over Bosnia and the Maastricht Treaty.
In March 2002, following several small strokes, she announced an end to her career in public speaking. Denis Thatcher, her husband of more than fifty years, died in June 2003, receiving warm tributes from all sides. After his death her own health deteriorated further and faster, causing progressive memory loss, and she died in London on 8 April 2013. She was honoured at a ceremonial funeral in St Paul's Cathedral nine days later.
Margaret Thatcher remains an intensely controversial figure in Britain. Critics claim that her economic policies were divisive socially, that she was harsh or 'uncaring' in her politics, and hostile to the institutions of the British welfare state. Defenders point to a transformation in Britain's economic performance over the course of the Thatcher Governments and those of her successors as Prime Minister. Trade union reforms, privatisation, deregulation, a strong anti-inflationary stance, and control of tax and spending have created better economic prospects for Britain than seemed possible when she became Prime Minister in 1979.
Critics and supporters alike recognise the Thatcher premiership as a period of fundamental importance in British history. Margaret Thatcher accumulated huge prestige over the course of the 1980s and often compelled the respect even of her bitterest critics. Indeed, her effect on the terms of political debate has been profound. Whether they were converted to 'Thatcherism', or merely forced by the electorate to pay it lip service, the Labour Party leadership was transformed by her period of office and the 'New Labour' politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would not have existed without her. Her legacy remains the core of modern British politics: the world economic crisis since 2008 has revived many of the arguments of the 1980s, keeping her name at the centre of political debate in Britain."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson LTC (Join to see) MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant TSgt David L. SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez SGT Herbert Bollum SPC Michael Oles SR SMSgt Tom Burns SGT (Join to see) SPC Nancy Greene
Why Margaret Thatcher Became The Most Controversial Figure Of The 80s | The Iron Lady | Timeline
Margaret Thatcher - The Iron Lady is the first major documentary to look back on the development and impact of this remarkable woman, whom commentators of both the political left and right agree changed the face of 20th Century politics forever. Featuring many excerpts from her powerful speeches and insightful contributions from her political supporters and detractors, a portrait emerges of a woman whose strength of conviction eventually became her weakness.
https://youtu.be/3A6l60knEzI?t=42
Images
1. Margaret Thatcher & Gorbachev at RAF Brize Norton, 7 December 1987
2. Margaret Thatcher at a friend's house, summer 1935.
3. The Thatcher family – Denis, Margaret and twins, Mark and Carol.
4. Margaret Thatcher in her mid-twenties
Background from {[https://www.margaretthatcher.org/essential/biography]}
"Margaret Thatcher's political career has been one of the most remarkable of modern times. Born in October 1925 at Grantham, a small market town in eastern England, she rose to become the first (and for two decades the only) woman to lead a major Western democracy. She won three successive General Elections and served as British Prime Minister for more than eleven years (1979-90), a record unmatched in the twentieth century.
During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination.
In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill.
By successfully shifting British economic and foreign policy to the right, her governments helped to encourage wider international trends which broadened and deepened during the 1980s and 1990s, as the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, and the growth of free markets strengthened political and economic freedom in every continent.
Margaret Thatcher became one of the world's most influential and respected political leaders, as well as one of the most controversial, dynamic, and plain-spoken, a reference point for friends and enemies alike.
1925-1947: GRANTHAM & OXFORD
Margaret Thatcher's home and early life in Grantham played a large part in forming her political convictions. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, were Methodists. The social life of the family was lived largely within the close community of the local congregation, bounded by strong traditions of self-help, charitable work, and personal truthfulness.
The Roberts family ran a grocery business, bringing up their two daughters in a flat over the shop. Margaret Roberts attended a local state school and from there won a place at Oxford, where she studied chemistry at Somerville College (1943-47). Her tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a pioneer of X-ray crystallography who won a Nobel Prize in 1964. Her outlook was profoundly influenced by her scientific training.
But chemistry took second place to politics in Margaret Thatcher's future plans. Conservative politics had always been a feature of her home life: her father was a local councillor in Grantham and talked through with her the issues of the day. She was elected president of the student Conservative Association at Oxford and met many prominent politicians, making herself known to the leadership of her party at the time of its devastating defeat by Labour at the General Election of 1945.
1950-1951: CANDIDATE FOR DARTFORD
In her mid-twenties she ran as the Conservative candidate for the strong Labour seat of Dartford at the General Elections of 1950 and 1951, winning national publicity as the youngest woman candidate in the country.
She lost both times, but cut the Labour majority sharply and hugely enjoyed the experience of campaigning. Aspects of her mature political style were formed in Dartford, a largely working class constituency which suffered as much as any from post-war rationing and shortages, as well as the rising level of taxation and state regulation. Unlike many Conservatives at that time, she had little difficulty getting a hearing from any audience and she spoke easily, with force and confidence, on issues that mattered to the voters.
1951-1970: FAMILY & CAREER
It was in Dartford too that she met her husband, Denis Thatcher, a local businessman who ran his family's firm before becoming an executive in the oil industry. They married in 1951. Twins — Mark and Carol —were born to the couple in 1953.
In the 1950s Margaret Thatcher trained as a lawyer, specialising in taxation. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 as Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley, a north London constituency, which she continued to represent until she was made a member of the House of Lords (as Baroness Thatcher) in 1992. Within two years, she was given junior office in the administration of Harold Macmillan and during 1964-70 (when the Conservatives were again in Opposition), established her place among the senior figures of the party, serving continuously as a shadow minister. When the Conservatives returned to office in 1970, under the premiership of Edward Heath, she achieved cabinet rank as Education Secretary.
1970-1974: EDUCATION MINISTER
Margaret Thatcher had a rough ride as Education Minister. The early 1970s saw student radicalism at its height and British politics at its least civil. Protesters disrupted her speeches, the opposition press vilified her, and education policy itself seemed set immovably in a leftwards course, which she and many Conservatives found uncomfortable. But she mastered the job and was toughened by the experience.
The Heath Government itself took a beating from events during its tenure (1970-74) and disappointed many. Elected on promises of economic revival through taming the trade unions and introducing more free market policies, it executed a series of policy reverses — nicknamed the 'U turns' — to become one of the most interventionist governments in British history, negotiating with the unions to introduce detailed control of wages, prices, and dividends. Defeated at a General Election in February 1974, the Heath Government left a legacy of inflation and industrial strife.
1975: ELECTED CONSERVATIVE LEADER
Many Conservatives were ready for a new approach after the Heath Government and when the Party lost a second General Election in October 1974, Margaret Thatcher ran against Heath for the leadership. To general surprise (her own included), in February 1975 she defeated him on the first ballot and won the contest outright on the second, though challenged by half a dozen senior colleagues. She became the first woman ever to lead a Western political party and to serve as Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons.
1975-1979: LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION
The Labour Government of 1974-79 was one of the most crisis-prone in British history, leading the country to a state of virtual bankruptcy in 1976 when a collapse in the value of the currency on the foreign exchanges forced the government to negotiate credit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF imposed tight expenditure controls on the government as a condition of the loan, which, ironically, improved Labour's public standing. By summer 1978, it even looked possible that it might win re-election.
But over the winter of 1978/79, Labour's luck ran out. Trade union pay demands led to an epidemic of strikes and showed that the government had little influence over its allies in the labour movement. Public opinion swung against Labour and the Conservatives won a Parliamentary majority of 43 at the General Election of May 1979. The following day, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
1979-1983: PRIME MINISTER – FIRST TERM
The new government pledged to check and reverse Britain's economic decline. In the short-term, painful measures were required. Although direct taxes were cut, to restore incentives, the budget had to be balanced, and so indirect taxes were increased. The economy was already entering a recession, but inflation was rising and interest rates had to be raised to control it. By the end of Margaret Thatcher's first term, unemployment in Britain was more than three million and it began to fall only in 1986. A large section of Britain's inefficient manufacturing industry closed down. No one had predicted how severe the downturn would be.
But vital long-term gains were made. Inflation was checked and the government created the expectation that it would do whatever was necessary to keep it low. The budget of spring 1981, increasing taxes at the lowest point of the recession, offended conventional Keynesian economic thinking, but it made possible a cut in interest rates and demonstrated this newly found determination. Economic recovery started in the same quarter and eight years of growth followed.
Political support flowed from this achievement, but the re-election of the government was only made certain by an unpredicted event: the Falklands War. The Argentine Junta's invasion of the islands in April 1982 was met by Margaret Thatcher in the firmest way and with a sure touch. Although she worked with the US administration in pursuing the possibility of a diplomatic solution, a British military Task Force was despatched to retake the islands. When diplomacy failed, military action was quickly successful and the Falklands were back under British control by June 1982.
The electorate was impressed. Few British or European leaders would have fought for the islands. By doing so, Margaret Thatcher laid the foundation for a much more vigorous and independent British foreign policy during the rest of the 1980s.When the General Election came in June 1983, the government was re-elected with its Parliamentary majority more than trebled (144 seats).
1983-1987: PRIME MINISTER – SECOND TERM
The second term opened with almost as many difficulties as the first. The government found itself challenged by the miners' union, which fought a year-long strike in 1984-85 under militant leadership. The labour movement as a whole put up bitter resistance to the government's trade union reforms, which began with legislation in 1980 and 1982 and continued after the General Election.
The miners' strike was one of the most violent and long lasting in British history. The outcome was uncertain, but after many turns in the road, the union was defeated. This proved a crucial development, because it ensured that the Thatcher reforms would endure. In the years that followed, the Labour Opposition quietly accepted the popularity and success of the trade union legislation and pledged not to reverse its key components.
In October 1984, when the strike was still underway, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempted to murder Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet by bombing her hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party annual conference. Although she survived unhurt, some of her closest colleagues were among the injured and dead and the room next to hers was severely damaged. No twentieth-century British Prime Minister ever came closer to assassination.
British policy in Northern Ireland had been a standing source of conflict for every Prime Minister since 1969, but Margaret Thatcher aroused the IRA's special hatred for her refusal to meet their political demands, notably during the 1980-81 prison hunger strikes.
Her policy throughout was implacably hostile to terrorism, republican or loyalist, although she matched that stance by negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 with the Republic of Ireland. The Agreement was an attempt to improve security cooperation between Britain and Ireland and to give some recognition to the political outlook of Catholics in Northern Ireland, an initiative which won warm endorsement from the Reagan administration and the US Congress.
The economy continued to improve during the 1983-87 Parliament and the policy of economic liberalisation was extended. The government began to pursue a policy of selling state assets, which in total had amounted to more than 20 per cent of the economy when the Conservatives came to power in 1979. The British privatisations of the 1980s were the first of their kind and proved influential across the world.
Where possible, sale of state assets took place through offering shares to the public, with generous terms for small investors. The Thatcher Governments presided over a great increase in the number of people saving through the stock market. They also encouraged people to buy their own homes and to make private pension provision, policies which over time have greatly increased the personal wealth of the British population.
The left wing of the Conservative Party had always been uneasy with its chief. In January 1986, enduring divisions between left and right in the Thatcher Cabinet were publicly exposed by the sudden resignation of the Defence Minister, Michael Heseltine, in a dispute over the business troubles of the British helicopter manufacturer, Westland. The fallout from the 'Westland Affair' challenged Margaret Thatcher's leadership as never before. She survived the crisis, but its effects were significant. She was subjected to heavy criticism within her own party for the decision to allow US warplanes to fly from British bases to attack targets in Libya (April 1986).There was talk of the government and of its leader being 'tired', of having gone on too long.
Her response was characteristic: at the Conservative Party's annual conference in October 1986, her speech foreshadowed a mass of reforms for a third Thatcher Government.With the economy now very strong, prospects were good for an election and the government was returned with a Parliamentary majority of 101in June 1987.
1987-1990:
Margaret Thatcher & Gorbachev at RAF Brize Norton, 7 December 1987.
The legislative platform of the third-term Thatcher Government was among the most ambitious ever put forward by a British administration. There were measures to reform the education system (1988), introducing a national curriculum for the first time. There was a new tax system for local government (1989), the Community Charge, or 'poll tax' as it was dubbed by opponents. And there was legislation to separate purchasers and providers within the National Health Service (1990), opening up the service to a measure of competition for the first time and increasing the scope for effective management.
All three measures were deeply controversial. The Community Charge, in particular, became a serious political problem, as local councils took advantage of the introduction of a new system to increase tax rates, blaming the increase on the Thatcher Government.(The system was abandoned by Margaret Thatcher's successor, John Major, in 1991.) By contrast, the education and health reforms proved enduring. Successive governments built on the achievement and in some respects extended their scope.
The economy boomed in 1987-88, but also began to overheat. Interest rates had to be doubled during 1988. A division within the government over management of the currency emerged into the open, Margaret Thatcher strongly opposing the policy urged by her Chancellor of the Exchequer and others, of pegging the pound sterling to the Deutschmark through the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). In the process, her relations with her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, were fatally damaged, and he resigned in October 1989.
Behind this dispute there was profound disagreement within the government over policy towards the European Community itself. The Prime Minister found herself increasingly at odds with her Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, on all questions touching European integration. Her speech at Bruges in September 1988 began the process by which the Conservative Party — at one time largely 'pro-European' — became predominantly 'Euro-sceptic'.
Paradoxically, all this took place against a backdrop of international events profoundly helpful to the Conservative cause. Margaret Thatcher played her part in the last phase of the Cold War, both in the strengthening of the Western alliance against the Soviets in the early 1980s and in the successful unwinding of the conflict later in the decade.
The Soviets had dubbed her the 'Iron Lady' — a tag she relished — for the tough line she took against them in speeches shortly after becoming Conservative leader in 1975. During the 1980s she offered strong support to the defence policies of the Reagan administration.
But when Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as a potential leader of the Soviet Union, she invited him to Britain in December 1984 and pronounced him a man she could do business with.She did not soften her criticisms of the Soviet system, making use of new opportunities to broadcast to television audiences in the east to put the case against Communism.Nevertheless, she played a constructive part in the diplomacy that smoothed the break-up of the Soviet Empire and of the Soviet Union itself in the years 1989-91.
By late 1990, the Cold War was over and free markets and institutions vindicated. But that event triggered the next stage in European integration, as France revived the project of a single European currency, hoping to check the power of a reunited Germany. As a result, divisions over European policy within the British Government were deepened by the end of the Cold War and now became acute.
On November 1 1990 Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned over Europe and in a bitter resignation speech precipitated a challenge to Margaret Thatcher's leadership of her party by Michael Heseltine. In the ballot that followed, she won a majority of the vote. Yet under party rules the margin was insufficient, and a second ballot was required. Receiving the news at a conference in Paris, she immediately announced her intention to fight on.
But a political earthquake occurred the next day on her return to London, when many colleagues in her cabinet — unsympathetic to her on Europe and doubting that she could win a fourth General Election — abruptly deserted her leadership and left her no choice but to withdraw. She resigned as Prime Minister on November 28 1990. John Major succeeded her and served in the post until the landslide election of Tony Blair's Labour Government in May 1997.
Chronology for 1987-1990 |
BIOGRAPHY: CONCLUSION
After 1990 Lady Thatcher (as she became) remained a potent political figure. She wrote two best-selling volumes of memoirs - The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995) - while continuing for a full decade to tour the world as a lecturer. A book of reflections on international politics - Statecraft - was published in 2002. During the period she made some important interventions in domestic British politics, notably over Bosnia and the Maastricht Treaty.
In March 2002, following several small strokes, she announced an end to her career in public speaking. Denis Thatcher, her husband of more than fifty years, died in June 2003, receiving warm tributes from all sides. After his death her own health deteriorated further and faster, causing progressive memory loss, and she died in London on 8 April 2013. She was honoured at a ceremonial funeral in St Paul's Cathedral nine days later.
Margaret Thatcher remains an intensely controversial figure in Britain. Critics claim that her economic policies were divisive socially, that she was harsh or 'uncaring' in her politics, and hostile to the institutions of the British welfare state. Defenders point to a transformation in Britain's economic performance over the course of the Thatcher Governments and those of her successors as Prime Minister. Trade union reforms, privatisation, deregulation, a strong anti-inflationary stance, and control of tax and spending have created better economic prospects for Britain than seemed possible when she became Prime Minister in 1979.
Critics and supporters alike recognise the Thatcher premiership as a period of fundamental importance in British history. Margaret Thatcher accumulated huge prestige over the course of the 1980s and often compelled the respect even of her bitterest critics. Indeed, her effect on the terms of political debate has been profound. Whether they were converted to 'Thatcherism', or merely forced by the electorate to pay it lip service, the Labour Party leadership was transformed by her period of office and the 'New Labour' politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would not have existed without her. Her legacy remains the core of modern British politics: the world economic crisis since 2008 has revived many of the arguments of the 1980s, keeping her name at the centre of political debate in Britain."
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Margaret Thatcher- The ‘Iron Lady’ Of Great Britain | Unseen Video | Must Watch
Log On To Our Official Website : http://www.lehren.comMargaret Hilda Thatcher was a British stateswoman and politician who was the Prime Minister of the Unit...
Margaret Thatcher | The Lady Not For Turning | Full Documentary
"Margaret Hilda Thatcher was a British stateswoman and politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and the Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, and the first woman to have held the office."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlJkowhKkug
1. Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan at Camp David, 22 December 1984.
2. Margaret Thatcher & Edward Heath - October 1970
3. Margaret Thatcher 'If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.'
4. Margaret Thatcher & Gorbachev on 7 December 1987
Background from {[https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/thatcher-papers/thatcher-biography/]}
"Margaret Thatcher: A biography
Early life and career
Margaret Thatcher was born in the small Lincolnshire market town of Grantham in October 1925, the second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. Her parents owned and ran a grocery. They were strong Methodists and Thatcher's early life was shaped by the church and the society of its small congregation: she grew up in a strong and watchful community, a place of duty, order, unsparing honesty, and charitable giving. Her father was a lay preacher and during her childhood became a prominent figure in the town, serving for many years on the finance committee of the council and holding the office of mayor in 1945/46. He had been brought up a Liberal and though an opponent of the local Labour Party, he never publicly described himself as a Conservative. He read widely and seriously, acquiring a great store of political knowledge: his daughter later joked that while Chancellors of the Exchequer and Treasury officials often talked to her about the Bank of England's "fiduciary issue", her father was the only man she had ever met who could actually define the term.
From a local state school Thatcher won a place to read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied between 1943 and 1947. Her college tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a brilliant crystallographer who later won a Nobel Prize. Thatcher's years at Oxford launched her political career. She was active in the Oxford University Conservative Association, becoming its president and meeting many of the party's most prominent figures, who thought it worth cultivating the hopeful young men and women of that university. Her first political speech was made during the 1945 General Election campaign.
Graduating in 1947, Thatcher began a brief career as a research chemist, moving to Colchester and then to Dartford, where she was selected as the Conservative candidate at the General Election of 1950. The seat was unwinnable for a Conservative at that time, but she hugely enjoyed the experience, showing characteristic energy and determination. As the youngest female candidate at the election (and one of the most attractive) she and her campaign achieved national attention in the press. The Dartford candidacy also brought her into the company of Denis Thatcher, a local businessman. They married in December 1951 to become one of the best-matched and happiest of political couples, a source of great strength in her subsequent career. Politics was from the very beginning a demanding presence in their relationship; it was perhaps a warning of the life to come when (without asking them) the local party agent leaked the news of their engagement, timing it for maximum political advantage.
In her early years as a married woman Thatcher trained as a barrister, specialising in tax law. In 1953 she became the mother of twins, Mark and Carol. Her efforts to win the candidature of a safe Conservative seat suffered from the perception that her proper place was in the home and she came close to abandoning the attempt, removing her name from the party's list of approved candidates. But politics held an overwhelming attraction for her and she had impressed influential figures in the party machine. She secured the candidature of a safe seat in North London - Finchley - in time to enter Parliament at the 1959 General Election, which was won by the Conservatives under the leadership of Harold Macmillan with a majority of 100.
________________________________________
Political life 1959-75
Once elected to the House of Commons, Thatcher rapidly made her way. She had a little luck: in her first session she won the right by ballot to introduce a private member's bill, which with skill and the help of several ministers she saw through the long parliamentary process into law. In 1961 she was invited to join the government as a junior minister at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. She became a skilful defender of policies before Parliament, marshalling arguments and statistics with effect. It was a style of speaking that fell short of high rhetoric; she might silence an opponent, but throughout her career as a Conservative frontbencher this most influential of politicians rarely sought to charm an audience and made few concessions to the growing political fashion for wearing hearts on sleeves. Instead she became the archetypal conviction politician, at her best speaking off the cuff, or thinking on her feet in a television interview in combative and plain-spoken style.
In her early years in Parliament, as at the General Election of 1950, Thatcher in some respects found her gender a political advantage. Politics was overwhelmingly the preserve of men when she began her career, and no woman had ever held the highest offices of state, let alone the Premiership. But the major parties needed at least one prominent woman in a leading position. Thatcher was quickly understood to be the most talented Conservative woman in the Commons, and as such was likely to reach cabinet rank. She remained a frontbencher after Labour won the 1964 General Election and entered the shadow cabinet in 1967, following two successful and happy years as deputy to the Shadow Chancellor, Iain Macleod. But her relations with the party leader of the day, Edward Heath, were never good, and she was sometimes dismissed as "the token woman", not least by some of her colleagues. When the Conservatives won the 1970 General Election she entered the Cabinet as Education Secretary, a post thought appropriate for a woman, which she held for the entire term of the Heath government.
Thatcher's years at Education proved a painful, indeed at times a shattering, experience. She was out of sympathy with some of the principal education policies of her party, notably its acquiescence in Labour's drive to end selection in secondary education by the "11-plus" exam. And in a period of rising student militancy and political ill-feeling in Britain, she quickly became a special target for attack from the left in politics and the media. In 1971 the abolition of free school milk for pupils over the age of 7 caused her to be dubbed "milk-snatcher" at the Labour Party Conference and she was endlessly mocked for her clothes and her voice, for her middle class manner and appearance. By the end of that year she often found it difficult to get a hearing when she visited schools and universities. She had become a hate figure for many of her opponents. Thatcher withstood the pressure and emerged significantly toughened. However, the impression left on opponents - and even on some Conservatives - that her character was harsh and unfeeling, even un-feminine, had an enduring effect on her career.
The Heath Government marked her in other ways. The rightward-leaning economic policies it had pursued in its first year were largely abandoned in the "U-turn" of 1972. A prices and incomes policy was introduced, which the trade unions met with hostility. A miners' strike in early 1974 prompted the government to call an early election on the theme "Who governs Britain?", a campaign fought against the background of power cuts and a three-day working week. The election was lost and the Conservatives returned to Opposition. In some respects Thatcher spent the rest of her career attempting to make good what she saw as the mistakes and failures of those years.
Heath remained Conservative leader a year longer, a man uncomfortable in Opposition. A second General Election was lost in October 1974 and he was pressured into offering himself for re-election as leader. Thatcher was by now plainly identified as one of the rising stars on the right wing of the party, but emerged as a candidate for the leadership only after her close friend and colleague, Sir Keith Joseph, declined to stand. Her campaign was well-managed and took full advantage of Heath's weakened position. To widespread public surprise, she beat him on the first ballot and in February 1975 defeated his principal lieutenants in a second ballot to become the first female party leader of any major western democracy.
As Leader of the Opposition, 1975-79, Thatcher's political position was rarely strong. She had little choice but to keep many of Heath's closest allies in her shadow cabinet and there were bitter doctrinal quarrels as "Thatcherism" began to be born, a programme of national recovery resting on a marriage of economic liberalism and strong government. In this period Thatcherism was often defined, sometimes provocatively, as an antidote to the supposed failings of the Heath Government, as well as to those of the Labour Government of the day. However, after years of stalemate on the most important questions of policy, fortune favoured Thatcher during the winter of 1978/79. A crop of strikes badly damaged the credibility of the Labour government and gave her the chance to strengthen the Conservative line on reform of the trade unions. As often before, she was skilful in making the best use of her opportunities. In the election that followed, Thatcher led her party to a majority of 43, becoming Britain's first woman Prime Minister on 4 May 1979.
________________________________________
Premiership 1979-90
Thatcher served three terms as Prime Minister and held the office consecutively for eleven and a half years, a unique achievement in twentieth century British political history. In that period she overturned many (but by no means all) of the policies that had dominated British public life since the end of the Second World War. She moved economic policy significantly to the right, in which respect her governments anticipated and helped to set in motion international trends during the 1980s. The large state sector was progressively slimmed by "privatisation", with the state airline, the steel, telecommunications, gas, electricity and water industries all sold by share offer. The control of inflation took primacy in economic policy and by the end of her term few argued that by tolerating higher inflation one could reduce unemployment. Direct taxes were cut and the growth of public expenditure controlled, aiming to reduce the proportion of national income spent by the state. A culture shift took place in which business and entrepreneurship became more highly valued, while the power of trade unions was reduced by a series of legislative acts opening them up to civil action in the courts (from which they had been exempted since the beginning of the century). Over the whole term of the Thatcher governments, 1979-90, there were marked improvements in some key economic measures, such as labour productivity, and the business environment was changed sufficiently to make Britain a favoured destination for foreign investment in Europe.
Not everything went as Thatcher would have wished. Unemployment rose sharply during her first government, reaching more than 3 million in 1981. It did not begin to fall until 1986, more than half way through her term. The "milk snatcher" image remained a problem, now updated and generalised into the charge that under her supposedly unfeeling leadership the government was neglecting public services (or worse). The public's affection for the National Health Service remained particularly strong and such criticisms were a source of continuing weakness to Thatcher. Thus her determination to revive "Victorian values" in Britain, a phrase she first used in 1981, achieved less in the sphere of social policy than in economic. When she turned her attention to social policy in her third term, the political fall-out of her reforms of the NHS, education and local government finance was largely negative, despite large increases in national expenditure in all three areas.
Developments in foreign affairs had a large impact on domestic politics. Thatcher might not have won re-election in 1983 had it not been for the Falklands War (March-June 1982), the Argentine invasion of the islands dramatically altering the national mood. As a war leader, Thatcher proved impressive to the electorate, and aided by the skill and courage of the armed services, she gained a political victory almost as complete as the military. In the years that followed, the close relationship that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, US President 1980-89, placed her at the centre of the resolution of the Cold War and she played an important part in creating a new era of détente with the Soviets in her dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev. This was another opportunity quickly grasped, and arguably it was an opportunity only available to a politician with impeccable anti-Soviet credentials. Thatcher had acquired that status as early as 1976 when the Soviets obligingly dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a politically helpful label the accuracy of which her subsequent career confirmed.
As Thatcher's premiership progressed, the Conservative Party was often said to be increasingly Thatcherite in its policies. But her relationship with colleagues in the collective leadership of the party was never easy. In the early 1980s she had struggled in cabinet against critics of her economic policy - "the wets" - and in January 1986 her leadership was threatened as never before by the resignation of Michael Heseltine during the Westland affair. In the years that following she found herself at odds with other colleagues, including some of her closest allies in earlier quarrels, notably Sir Geoffrey Howe, Foreign Secretary 1983-89. Issues of personality formed part of the problem, but there were also large differences of substance between them, especially on policy towards the European Union. In September 1988 in a speech at Bruges, Thatcher launched an open assault on what she believed to be the threat to British interests constituted by further European integration. The speech opened public divisions among Conservatives at every level of politics and began the process of overturning the political axiom, dating from the days of Harold Macmillan, that the party was "pro-European".
Eventually personal and political differences within the leadership proved politically fatal to Thatcher. Party rules dating from the end of Heath's leadership provided for annual elections to the post and in November 1990 a contest was triggered by Michael Heseltine, following the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe over European policy. Although Thatcher won a majority of the vote, under party rules the majority was not sufficient to avert a second ballot. Faced with the possibility of defeat and discovering that she lacked the full-hearted support of many cabinet colleagues, she resigned as party leader and as Prime Minister.
Thatcher's achievement as party leader was remarkable in many respects. Few doubt her impact, whether they think it good or ill. She rehabilitated the idea of political leadership in Britain, discarding and in fact making ridiculous the conventional wisdom of the 1970s that the country had become "ungovernable". Under her leadership fashionable pessimism ceased to be fashionable and talk of national decline largely faded. She put in its place a dynamic style of government, unfamiliar to Conservatives and Labour alike, but sufficiently compelling to encourage her opponents to ape the style in which she led and even to present themselves as her natural successors in fiscal rigour and business sense. She became the first British politician since Churchill to achieve significant international standing and remains one of the most newsworthy individuals on the planet.
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"Margaret Hilda Thatcher was a British stateswoman and politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and the Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, and the first woman to have held the office."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlJkowhKkug
1. Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan at Camp David, 22 December 1984.
2. Margaret Thatcher & Edward Heath - October 1970
3. Margaret Thatcher 'If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.'
4. Margaret Thatcher & Gorbachev on 7 December 1987
Background from {[https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/thatcher-papers/thatcher-biography/]}
"Margaret Thatcher: A biography
Early life and career
Margaret Thatcher was born in the small Lincolnshire market town of Grantham in October 1925, the second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. Her parents owned and ran a grocery. They were strong Methodists and Thatcher's early life was shaped by the church and the society of its small congregation: she grew up in a strong and watchful community, a place of duty, order, unsparing honesty, and charitable giving. Her father was a lay preacher and during her childhood became a prominent figure in the town, serving for many years on the finance committee of the council and holding the office of mayor in 1945/46. He had been brought up a Liberal and though an opponent of the local Labour Party, he never publicly described himself as a Conservative. He read widely and seriously, acquiring a great store of political knowledge: his daughter later joked that while Chancellors of the Exchequer and Treasury officials often talked to her about the Bank of England's "fiduciary issue", her father was the only man she had ever met who could actually define the term.
From a local state school Thatcher won a place to read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied between 1943 and 1947. Her college tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a brilliant crystallographer who later won a Nobel Prize. Thatcher's years at Oxford launched her political career. She was active in the Oxford University Conservative Association, becoming its president and meeting many of the party's most prominent figures, who thought it worth cultivating the hopeful young men and women of that university. Her first political speech was made during the 1945 General Election campaign.
Graduating in 1947, Thatcher began a brief career as a research chemist, moving to Colchester and then to Dartford, where she was selected as the Conservative candidate at the General Election of 1950. The seat was unwinnable for a Conservative at that time, but she hugely enjoyed the experience, showing characteristic energy and determination. As the youngest female candidate at the election (and one of the most attractive) she and her campaign achieved national attention in the press. The Dartford candidacy also brought her into the company of Denis Thatcher, a local businessman. They married in December 1951 to become one of the best-matched and happiest of political couples, a source of great strength in her subsequent career. Politics was from the very beginning a demanding presence in their relationship; it was perhaps a warning of the life to come when (without asking them) the local party agent leaked the news of their engagement, timing it for maximum political advantage.
In her early years as a married woman Thatcher trained as a barrister, specialising in tax law. In 1953 she became the mother of twins, Mark and Carol. Her efforts to win the candidature of a safe Conservative seat suffered from the perception that her proper place was in the home and she came close to abandoning the attempt, removing her name from the party's list of approved candidates. But politics held an overwhelming attraction for her and she had impressed influential figures in the party machine. She secured the candidature of a safe seat in North London - Finchley - in time to enter Parliament at the 1959 General Election, which was won by the Conservatives under the leadership of Harold Macmillan with a majority of 100.
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Political life 1959-75
Once elected to the House of Commons, Thatcher rapidly made her way. She had a little luck: in her first session she won the right by ballot to introduce a private member's bill, which with skill and the help of several ministers she saw through the long parliamentary process into law. In 1961 she was invited to join the government as a junior minister at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. She became a skilful defender of policies before Parliament, marshalling arguments and statistics with effect. It was a style of speaking that fell short of high rhetoric; she might silence an opponent, but throughout her career as a Conservative frontbencher this most influential of politicians rarely sought to charm an audience and made few concessions to the growing political fashion for wearing hearts on sleeves. Instead she became the archetypal conviction politician, at her best speaking off the cuff, or thinking on her feet in a television interview in combative and plain-spoken style.
In her early years in Parliament, as at the General Election of 1950, Thatcher in some respects found her gender a political advantage. Politics was overwhelmingly the preserve of men when she began her career, and no woman had ever held the highest offices of state, let alone the Premiership. But the major parties needed at least one prominent woman in a leading position. Thatcher was quickly understood to be the most talented Conservative woman in the Commons, and as such was likely to reach cabinet rank. She remained a frontbencher after Labour won the 1964 General Election and entered the shadow cabinet in 1967, following two successful and happy years as deputy to the Shadow Chancellor, Iain Macleod. But her relations with the party leader of the day, Edward Heath, were never good, and she was sometimes dismissed as "the token woman", not least by some of her colleagues. When the Conservatives won the 1970 General Election she entered the Cabinet as Education Secretary, a post thought appropriate for a woman, which she held for the entire term of the Heath government.
Thatcher's years at Education proved a painful, indeed at times a shattering, experience. She was out of sympathy with some of the principal education policies of her party, notably its acquiescence in Labour's drive to end selection in secondary education by the "11-plus" exam. And in a period of rising student militancy and political ill-feeling in Britain, she quickly became a special target for attack from the left in politics and the media. In 1971 the abolition of free school milk for pupils over the age of 7 caused her to be dubbed "milk-snatcher" at the Labour Party Conference and she was endlessly mocked for her clothes and her voice, for her middle class manner and appearance. By the end of that year she often found it difficult to get a hearing when she visited schools and universities. She had become a hate figure for many of her opponents. Thatcher withstood the pressure and emerged significantly toughened. However, the impression left on opponents - and even on some Conservatives - that her character was harsh and unfeeling, even un-feminine, had an enduring effect on her career.
The Heath Government marked her in other ways. The rightward-leaning economic policies it had pursued in its first year were largely abandoned in the "U-turn" of 1972. A prices and incomes policy was introduced, which the trade unions met with hostility. A miners' strike in early 1974 prompted the government to call an early election on the theme "Who governs Britain?", a campaign fought against the background of power cuts and a three-day working week. The election was lost and the Conservatives returned to Opposition. In some respects Thatcher spent the rest of her career attempting to make good what she saw as the mistakes and failures of those years.
Heath remained Conservative leader a year longer, a man uncomfortable in Opposition. A second General Election was lost in October 1974 and he was pressured into offering himself for re-election as leader. Thatcher was by now plainly identified as one of the rising stars on the right wing of the party, but emerged as a candidate for the leadership only after her close friend and colleague, Sir Keith Joseph, declined to stand. Her campaign was well-managed and took full advantage of Heath's weakened position. To widespread public surprise, she beat him on the first ballot and in February 1975 defeated his principal lieutenants in a second ballot to become the first female party leader of any major western democracy.
As Leader of the Opposition, 1975-79, Thatcher's political position was rarely strong. She had little choice but to keep many of Heath's closest allies in her shadow cabinet and there were bitter doctrinal quarrels as "Thatcherism" began to be born, a programme of national recovery resting on a marriage of economic liberalism and strong government. In this period Thatcherism was often defined, sometimes provocatively, as an antidote to the supposed failings of the Heath Government, as well as to those of the Labour Government of the day. However, after years of stalemate on the most important questions of policy, fortune favoured Thatcher during the winter of 1978/79. A crop of strikes badly damaged the credibility of the Labour government and gave her the chance to strengthen the Conservative line on reform of the trade unions. As often before, she was skilful in making the best use of her opportunities. In the election that followed, Thatcher led her party to a majority of 43, becoming Britain's first woman Prime Minister on 4 May 1979.
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Premiership 1979-90
Thatcher served three terms as Prime Minister and held the office consecutively for eleven and a half years, a unique achievement in twentieth century British political history. In that period she overturned many (but by no means all) of the policies that had dominated British public life since the end of the Second World War. She moved economic policy significantly to the right, in which respect her governments anticipated and helped to set in motion international trends during the 1980s. The large state sector was progressively slimmed by "privatisation", with the state airline, the steel, telecommunications, gas, electricity and water industries all sold by share offer. The control of inflation took primacy in economic policy and by the end of her term few argued that by tolerating higher inflation one could reduce unemployment. Direct taxes were cut and the growth of public expenditure controlled, aiming to reduce the proportion of national income spent by the state. A culture shift took place in which business and entrepreneurship became more highly valued, while the power of trade unions was reduced by a series of legislative acts opening them up to civil action in the courts (from which they had been exempted since the beginning of the century). Over the whole term of the Thatcher governments, 1979-90, there were marked improvements in some key economic measures, such as labour productivity, and the business environment was changed sufficiently to make Britain a favoured destination for foreign investment in Europe.
Not everything went as Thatcher would have wished. Unemployment rose sharply during her first government, reaching more than 3 million in 1981. It did not begin to fall until 1986, more than half way through her term. The "milk snatcher" image remained a problem, now updated and generalised into the charge that under her supposedly unfeeling leadership the government was neglecting public services (or worse). The public's affection for the National Health Service remained particularly strong and such criticisms were a source of continuing weakness to Thatcher. Thus her determination to revive "Victorian values" in Britain, a phrase she first used in 1981, achieved less in the sphere of social policy than in economic. When she turned her attention to social policy in her third term, the political fall-out of her reforms of the NHS, education and local government finance was largely negative, despite large increases in national expenditure in all three areas.
Developments in foreign affairs had a large impact on domestic politics. Thatcher might not have won re-election in 1983 had it not been for the Falklands War (March-June 1982), the Argentine invasion of the islands dramatically altering the national mood. As a war leader, Thatcher proved impressive to the electorate, and aided by the skill and courage of the armed services, she gained a political victory almost as complete as the military. In the years that followed, the close relationship that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, US President 1980-89, placed her at the centre of the resolution of the Cold War and she played an important part in creating a new era of détente with the Soviets in her dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev. This was another opportunity quickly grasped, and arguably it was an opportunity only available to a politician with impeccable anti-Soviet credentials. Thatcher had acquired that status as early as 1976 when the Soviets obligingly dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a politically helpful label the accuracy of which her subsequent career confirmed.
As Thatcher's premiership progressed, the Conservative Party was often said to be increasingly Thatcherite in its policies. But her relationship with colleagues in the collective leadership of the party was never easy. In the early 1980s she had struggled in cabinet against critics of her economic policy - "the wets" - and in January 1986 her leadership was threatened as never before by the resignation of Michael Heseltine during the Westland affair. In the years that following she found herself at odds with other colleagues, including some of her closest allies in earlier quarrels, notably Sir Geoffrey Howe, Foreign Secretary 1983-89. Issues of personality formed part of the problem, but there were also large differences of substance between them, especially on policy towards the European Union. In September 1988 in a speech at Bruges, Thatcher launched an open assault on what she believed to be the threat to British interests constituted by further European integration. The speech opened public divisions among Conservatives at every level of politics and began the process of overturning the political axiom, dating from the days of Harold Macmillan, that the party was "pro-European".
Eventually personal and political differences within the leadership proved politically fatal to Thatcher. Party rules dating from the end of Heath's leadership provided for annual elections to the post and in November 1990 a contest was triggered by Michael Heseltine, following the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe over European policy. Although Thatcher won a majority of the vote, under party rules the majority was not sufficient to avert a second ballot. Faced with the possibility of defeat and discovering that she lacked the full-hearted support of many cabinet colleagues, she resigned as party leader and as Prime Minister.
Thatcher's achievement as party leader was remarkable in many respects. Few doubt her impact, whether they think it good or ill. She rehabilitated the idea of political leadership in Britain, discarding and in fact making ridiculous the conventional wisdom of the 1970s that the country had become "ungovernable". Under her leadership fashionable pessimism ceased to be fashionable and talk of national decline largely faded. She put in its place a dynamic style of government, unfamiliar to Conservatives and Labour alike, but sufficiently compelling to encourage her opponents to ape the style in which she led and even to present themselves as her natural successors in fiscal rigour and business sense. She became the first British politician since Churchill to achieve significant international standing and remains one of the most newsworthy individuals on the planet.
FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySGT Michael HearnSGT Randell Rose[SGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC Don VanceSFC (Join to see) SPC Nancy GreenePVT Mark Zehner Lt Col Charlie Brown
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CSM Charles Hayden
LTC Stephen F. I appreciate that one of America’s favorites, Reagan resonated so well with a British PM. It was a different relationship than that of former Naval Officers FDR and Winston Churchill.
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