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Margaret Thatcher (1925- )British prime minister. Born Margaret Roberts on 13 October 1925, in Grantham, Lincolnshire, her father was a cornershop grocer. She studied chemistry at Oxford, became a research chemist, and stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative party candidate for Parliament in 1950 and 1951. Then she married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman, studied law, and was elected to Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Although she became secretary for state for education in 1971, she was relatively unknown in 1975 when she contested the Conservative leadership of Edward Heath. But her campaign gathered momentum and she became the first woman to lead a main British political party. At first conciliatory, she hardened her grip on the party and led it to electoral victory in 1979. Convinced that the Labour party's socialist policies were bad for the country, she began to develop her own brand of patriotic rhetoric, free-market economics and anti-trade union legislation. Her initial unpopularity with the public changed when the Iron Lady (as she had been nicknamed by the Soviets) led the country in the Falklands War of 1982, which reclaimed the islands from an Argentinian invasion. As a result, she won the 1983 election with a record majority. She led the way in making drastic reductions of state spending, cutting taxes and curbing inflation. At the same time, the gap between rich and poor widened, there was mass unemployment and a major recession in 1989. Thatcher's attack on trade unions culminated in the 1984-5 miners' strike, when government victory was achieved at enormous social cost. In foreign policy, her close relationship with US president Ronald Reagan put her at the centre of international affairs, and her acute insight that Mikhail Gorbachev was a 'man we can do business with' helped end the Cold War. Her unremitting hostility to European integration didn't prevent her from signing the Single European Act of 1986. Despite Thatcher's record of three successive election victories, she failed to appreciate the unpopularity of the poll tax, and she lost a challenge to her leadership in 1990. Since then she has remained a background figure, a baroness who inspires anti-European Tories and nostalgic activists. |
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