Margaret Thatcher was
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. She was born
in 1925 and spent her childhood in Grantham, where her father owned
two grocery shops. She was also the first woman to head a major
political party (the Conservative Party) in the United Kingdom.
She graduated from Oxford
in 1947 with a Second Class Honours in Chemistry.
Margaret
Thatcher's politics were : the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, the
triumph of capitalism, the almost universal acceptance of the market
as indispensable to prosperity, the collapse of Soviet imperialism.
She is one of the most
admired but also one of the most hated British Political figures, her
vision of Great Britain having totally changed the British political
scene. The deputy Peter Mandelson famously declared that "we are
all Thatcherites now".
Most of the major British
political parties today accept the anti-trade union legislation,
privatisation of State industries, and general free market approach
that Thatcher's governments installed.
Thatcher also supported
Britain's entry into the European Economic Community in 1973,
campaigned for a yes vote in the 1975 referendum on continued
membership of the Common Market, and signed the Single European Act
in 1986. However, she became truly Eurosceptic in the last years of
her time as Prime Minister.
She is credited by her
supporters with reviving the British economy and saving the country
from crisis, a revolutionary figure who transformed Britain's
stagnant economy, tamed the unions and re-established the country as
a world power.
However some parts of her
policies were controversial : she was opposed to gay rights ;
when she resigned in 1990, 28% of the children in Great Britain were
considered to be below the poverty line...
