Margaret Thatcher . Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (from May 4 , 1979 to November 28 , 1990 ). Her firmness in directing state affairs, her strict control over her cabinet ministers and her strong monetarist policy earned her the nickname “The Iron Lady.”
She was the first woman to serve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom , as well as the longest-serving chief executive in the past 150 years. She was invited to the Bilderberg Club before they were elected to the highest government office in Britain .
He applied a radical program of privatizations and deregulation, took powers away from the unions, reduced taxes and introduced market mechanisms in health and education.
Her long-time Foreign Minister Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in November 1990 in protest at Thatcher’s attitude towards Europe . [4] His resignation speech opened a deep crisis in the party that ultimately led to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher at the end of the same month.
Biography
Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 of October of 1925 in the town of Grantham, county of Lincolnshire , England . His father, Alfred Roberts, became a councilor for his town.
Margaret Thatcher studied at Kesteven Girls’ School and later at Somerville Educational Institution, entering Oxford University in 1944 to study chemistry. She became president of the Conservative Association at the University of Oxford in 1946 , the third woman to hold the position. She graduated and began working as a chemical researcher for British Xylonite and later for J. Lyons and Co. , where she helped develop methods for preserving ice cream.
In 1951 she married Denis Thatcher, a top executive in the oil industry. Margaret graduated as a lawyer in 1953, the same year her twin children Carol Thatcher and Mark Thatcher were born . As a lawyer she specialized in tax law.
Political career
In 1959 he easily won a seat in the House of Commons . [4] In 1961 he went against his party’s voting line for the restoration of physical punishment in schools. She was promoted as parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Social Affairs in September 1961, holding the post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 elections .
Thatcher was one of the few members of parliament to support Leo Abse’s bill to decriminalize homosexuality. He also voted in favor of David Stell’s bill to legalize abortion in the event of mental or physical deficiencies of the fetus or the mother’s inability to take care of the child. However, he was in favor of maintaining the death penalty and voted against facilitating divorces.
She forged her career in politics and as a conference speaker in 1966 , with a tough attack on the tax-raising policies of the Labor government, which she said were a step “not only toward socialism , but toward communism as well .”
Edward Heath’s Cabinet
When the Conservative party, under Edward Heath , won the 1970 general election , Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science. In his first month in the ministry, he forced the Administration to cut the education budget. It abolished free milk for schools between the ages of seven and eleven, sparking a wave of protests.
After the defeat of the Conservatives in the 1974 elections, she was transferred back to the opposition secretariat of the environment. In this position, he promised to abolish the current system of collecting taxes, which were used to pay for local government services, which led to popular policy within the conservative party.
After his party lost the second election in 1974 , Sir Keith Joseph decided to wrest the leadership from Heath, although he later withdrew. So Thatcher decided that she should enter the race to head the Conservative Party in 1975 on behalf of the Joseph faction and the Center for Political Studies.
The Conservative Party became the leader on February 11 , 1975 .
Leader of the Conservative Party
The 19 of January of 1976 , Thatcher made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which he made a fierce attack on the Soviet Union . The most famous part of his speech says:
The Russians are bent on world domination, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has ever seen. The men of the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ups and downs of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put anything before guns.
In response, the Soviet newspaper Red Star gave her the nickname the Iron Lady , which was quickly publicized by Radio Moscow . Thatcher reveled in the nickname.
During the general elections of the year 1979 , most opinion polls showed that voters preferred to James Callaghan as Prime Minister even as the Conservative Party remained as the leader in the polls.
The Labor government of James Callaghan fell after a successful vote of no confidence in the summer of 1979, and in the 1979 general election the Conservatives won a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons, and Margaret Thatcher became the first. UK woman to be Prime Minister.
First minister
Thatcher became the first (and so far only) woman to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on May 4 , 1979 . He wanted to restore for the United Kingdom a higher level of influence and leadership in international relations. Due to her ideology and way of governing she was considered a soul mate of Ronald Reagan , elected in 1980 in the United States . Both Thatcher and Reagan appealed to internal intimidation, to the proclamation that the highest interests of national security were at risk, and so-called “old values.”
The 1 of March of 1981 a group of activists of the Republican Army in Ireland ( IRA ) who were prisoners began a strike staged hunger that killed 10 of them to the indifference of the British government of Prime Minister Conservative Margaret Thatcher .
They demanded that they be given the status of political prisoners and the right to wear their own clothes, instead of the prison uniform of common criminals. They also asked that they not be prohibited from doing physical exercises or reading. But the uncompromising Prime Minister of England’s response was:
… we are not prepared to consider special category status to certain groups of people serving sentences for crimes. Crime is crime, it is not politics. [7]
When the leader of the hunger strikers, Bobby Sands, died, Prime Minister Thatcher appeared before the British Parliament to justify her position and said she did not feel remorse for the death of the IRA fighter.
Mr. Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to end his own life. That is a choice that your organization does not allow for most of its victims. [8]
Park in Victor Hugo in Havana , Cuba , is a monument ” In memory of the martyrs Irish-Ireland and Cuba solidarity “. This memorial consists of a tombstone, in which, next to a chained figure of the Greek mythological hero Prometheus , a fragment of the speech delivered by Fidel Castro on September 18 , 1981 before the 68 Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union , is read. celebrated in the capital of Cuba:
The stubbornness, intransigence, cruelty, insensitivity to the international community of the British government in the face of the problem of Irish patriots on hunger strike to death, recalls Torquemada and the barbarism of the inquisition in the middle ages . Tyrants tremble before men who are capable of dying for their ideas, after 60 days of hunger strike! Next to this example, what were the three days of Christ on Calvary, a symbol of human sacrifice for centuries? It is time to put an end, through denunciation and pressure from the world community, to this disgusting atrocity!
Fidel Castro
As a monetarist, Thatcher began her economic policy by increasing interest rates to curb the growth of money supplies and thus lower inflation. It had a preference for indirect taxes over income tax, and the VAT rose sharply to 15%, actually increasing inflation in the short term. These actions hurt business – especially the manufacturing sector – and unemployment quickly surpassed two million, doubling the number of unemployed under the previous Labor government.
Malvinas War
In 1833 the English invaded the Falkland Islands with a naval force far superior to the Argentines, whom they ended up expelling. The place was baptized as the Falkland Islands (in honor of a nobleman who sponsored an expedition to the area). Argentina , which had just become independent, normally inherited the territories formerly belonging to Spain , including the archipelago discovered by Magellan in 1520 , and placed at the mercy of the Spanish Crown. Argentina has never recognized the territories occupied by force. It is noteworthy that the islanders have only had British citizenship since 1983 , after theFalklands War .
The United Nations had firmly adhered to the doctrine of the just war through the approval, by large majorities, of resolutions that explicitly recognized the legitimacy of wars of liberation, self-determination, contrary to racial oppression, etc. Protected by this legal antecedent, the mention of a hypothetical recovery of the islands by armed means had been present in the bilateral diplomatic discourse since 1972 .
The Operation Rosario (name of the landing operation, the amphibious operation was named Operation Blue ) consisted of a series of actions aimed at increasing intensity Argentina ‘s recovery of the Malvinas, Georgias of the South and Sandwich of the South.
Thatcher reacted quickly, sending a naval force within days of the incident with the mission of recapturing the islands. In a 2009 documentary broadcast by the BBC , ” Caligula “, in scenes censored by television, Thatcher’s husband, Denis, blames her for the lives that will be lost in the conflict, but Thatcher does not deny her decision, and adds that he would like to know ” how many male prime ministers would do what I have done .” [10]
When her husband tells her about the soldiers who will die in the war, she answers: “They will do it for England , for freedom, for democracy,” but he replies:
“No Margaret, the soldiers will die for you . ” [10]
Argentina lost the war and the final cost of the war in human lives was 649 Argentine soldiers, 255 British and 3 island civilians.
One of the most spectacular chapters of the book ” Rendez-Vous: Francois Mitterrand’s psychoanalysis ” is the one that relates to Thatcher and the Falklands War. The Iron Lady intended to drop nuclear weapons against Argentina, unless Mitterrand gave her the secret codes of the Gallic Exocet missiles in the hands of the Argentine Navy.
The result of the English attack with a one-megaton nuclear missile against the Córdoba material area would have meant the complete destruction of the Argentine military-industrial complex, while at the same time wiping the city of Córdoba and surrounding areas off the map. The area of influence would have remained radioactive for thousands of years, since isotopes in nuclear materials do not cease to be active until long after contaminating a specific area.
The nuclear issue related to Malvinas has become such a thorny issue for British politicians that the English government’s files on the issue of the conflict will only be fully known in 2050 .
Currently the British government declares an interest “to support the Falkland Islands government in conducting its legitimate business on its territory.” This is due to the existence of hydrocarbons in the sea surrounding the Malvinas.
Argentina once again reiterated its claim to sovereignty over the Malvinas and described the position of the United Kingdom as “incomprehensible”, which maintains its refusal to initiate a negotiation to resolve the dispute.
Re-election
In the 1983 UK general election , the Conservatives won 42.4% of the vote, the Labor Party 27.6% and the Alliance 25.4% of the vote. Under Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives had won with a 144 majority over other parties, the largest majority achieved by a candidate since 1935 .
He won the 1987 general election again .
During his third term, a system of education for unemployed adults was created that included a full-time job done for unemployment benefit. This work was paid for with only 10 additional pounds. It is a model imported from the USA.
In 1987 Margaret Thatcher and her Canadian colleague Brian Mulroney convinced their G7 colleagues (the United States , France , Germany, and Italy ) to fund an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IGEC).
Death
He died on Monday , 8 of April of 2013 at 87 years old after a stroke [11] .