Margaret thatcher

Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first female prime minister and served three consecutive terms in office. She is one of the dominant political figures of 20^th century Britain and Thatcherism continues to have a huge influence. 

      SHORT NON POLITICAL BIOGROFY 
 

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 23 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and the daughter of grocer. She went to Oxford University and then became a research chemist retraining to become a barrister in 1954. In 1951 she married a wealthy businessman Denis Thatcher with whom she had two children. 

      EARLY POLITICAL CAREER 
 

In the February 1950 and October 1951 general elections she campaigned for the safe Labour seat of Dartford where she attached media attention as the youngest and the only female candidate. She lost both times to Norman Dodds but reduced the Labour majority by 6000 and then a further 1000. During the campaigns she supported by her parents and by Denis Thatcher. Denis funded his wife’s studies for the bar. 
 

      MAMBER OF PARLIAMENT (1959-1970) 
 

Thatcher began looking for a safe Conservative seat in the mid-1950s. She was narrowly rejected as the candidate for  Orpington in 1955 but was selected for  Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat after a hard campaign in the 1959 election and was elected as Member of  Parliament ( MP ).Her maiden speech  was in support of her private member’s bill requiring local authorities  to hold their council meetings in public. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party’s  official position  by voting for the restoration of birching.

In October 1961 Thatcher was promoted  to the front  bench as Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Ministry of Pension and National Insurance in Harold  Macmillan’s administration. After the loss of  the 1964 election  she became  Conservative spokesman  on Housing and Land , in which position she advocated the Conservative policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses .

She moved to the Shadow Treasury team in 1966 and as Treasury spokesman opposed  Labour’s mandatory  price and income controls , arguing that they would produce  contrary effects to those intended and distort the economy.

At the Conservative Party Conference of 1966 she criticized  the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps “ not only towards Socialism , but  towards Communism” . Thatcher was one of the few Conservative MPs to support  Leo Abse’s  Bill to decriminalize  male homosexuality  and voted in favor  of  David Steel’s  Bill to legalize  abortion , as well as a ban on hare coursing .

In 1967 she was selected by the US Embassy in London to take part  in the International Visitor Leadership Program , a professional exchange programmer  that gave her  the opportunity  to spend about six  weeks visiting various US cities , political figures and institutions such as the International Monitory Fund . Shortly before the 1970 general election she was promoted to Shadow Transport and then to Education. 
 

      LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION ( 1975-1979) 
 

The Health government continued to experience difficulties with oil embargoes and union demands for wage increases in 1973 and was defeated in February 1974 general election. The Conservative result in the general election of  October 1974 was even worse and Thatcher mounted a challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Promising a fresh start , she drew her main support  from the Conservative Committee. She defeated Heath on the first ballot and he resigned the leadership. In the second ballot she defeated  Heath’s  preferred successor , William Whitelaw , and became party leader  on 11 February 1975 , she appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained disenchanted with Thatcher to the end of his life for what he and many of his supporters perceived her disloyalty in standing against him.

Thatcher began at this time regularly to attend lurches at the Institute of Economic Affairs ( IEA ) , a think tank founded by the poultry magnate Anthony Fisher , a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek , she had begun visiting the IEA and reading its publications  during the early 1960s . She came in contact there with Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, who became the face of the ideological movement that opposed the welfare state Keynesian economics they believed, was weakening Britain. The institute’s  pamphlets proposed less government , lawyer taxes and more freedom for business and consumers.

Thatcher began to work on her voice and screen image. The critic Clive James, writing in The Observer in 1977, compared her voice of 1973 to a cat sliding down a blackboard but acknowledged her intelligence and mental agility.

On 19 January 1976 Thatcher made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scatching attack on the Soviet Union.

“The Russians are bent on  world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about  the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter while we put just everything before guns”.

In response, the Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (RED STAR) gave her the nickname “Iron Lady “. She took delight in the name and it soon became associated with her image. 

      PRIME MINISTER (1979-1990) 
 

Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979. Arriving at 10 Downing Street, she said in a paraphrase of the Prayer of Saint Francis.

“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is a doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair , may we bring hope”. 
 
 

      DOMESTIC AFFAIRS 
 

Thatcher was a Prime Minister at time of great racial tension in Britain. Her standing in the polls rose by 11% after she said in a TV interview  during campaigning for the 1979 election. “The moment a minority threatens to became a big one, people get frightened. The British character has done so much for democracy, for law, that if there is any fears that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in”. She complained privately about Asian immigration in July 1979, in context of restricting the number of  Vietnamese boat people settling in the UK. Her stance on these issues was perceived as taking votes from the openly racist National Front.

As Prime Minister, Thatcher met weekly with Queen Elizabeth 2 to discus government business and their relationship came under close scrutiny. In July 1986 the Sunday Times reported claims attributed to the Queen’s adviser of a “rift” between  Buckingham Palace and Downing Street “over a wide range of domestic and international issues”. The Palace issued an official denial, heading off speculation about a possible constitutional crisis. After Thatcher’s retirement a senior Palace  source again dismissed as “nonsense” the “stereotyped idea” that she had not got along with the Queen or that they had fallen out over Thatch rile policies. Thatcher herself declared that “stories of clashes between two powerful women were too good not to make up… I always found the Queen’s attitude towards the work of the government absolutely correct”.   

      FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Thatcher took office in the final decade of the Cold War became closely aligned with the policies of US president Ronald Reagan, based on their shared distrust of Communism.

During her first year as Prime Minister she supported NATO’s decision to deploy US nuclear cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe and permitted the US to station more than 160 cruise missiles at RAF Green ham Common, starting on 14 November 1983. This triggered mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She bought the Trident nuclear missiles submarine system from the US to replace Polaris, resulting in a tripling of Britain’s nuclear forces at an eventual coast of more than 12 billion ( at 1996-1997 prices). She strongly opposed Reagan’s October 1983 invasion of Grenada but the US went ahead with it anyway.

Thatcher’s preference for defense ties with the US was demonstrated  in the Westland affair of January 1986. She acted with colleagues to allow the struggling helicopter  manufacturer Westland, a defense contractor, to refuse an offer from the Italian firm Agusta in favour of the management’s  preffered option, a link with Skorsky Aircraft Corporation. The UK Defense Secretary, Michael Heseltine, who had supported the Agusta deal, resigned in protest.

In April 1986 Thatcher permitted USF_111s to use RAF bases for the bombing of Libya in relation for the alleged Libyan bombing of a Berlin discotheque, citing the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Polls suggested that less than one in three British citizens approved of Thatcher’s decision.

Later that year the US Congress approved an extradition treaty intended to stop IRA operatives evading extradition. The US Senate only ratified this treaty when Reagan explicitly mentioned British support for the bombing of Libya.

Thatcher was one of the first Western leaders to respond warmly to reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Following Reagan-Gorbachev summit  meetings and reforms enacted by Gorbachev in the USSR,Thatcher declared in November 1988,”We are not in a Cold War now” but rather in a “new relationship much winder than the Cold War ever was”.