Britain's 'Iron Lady' Margaret Thatcher dies

Deutsche Welle, 8 April 2013

Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher has died of a stroke at the age of 87. She was the most important British politician of the post-war period.

Margaret Thatcher was the politician by whom all her successors measured themselves. Both Labour and Conservative leaders are still defined - and often define themselves - by their stand on the mix of policies which became known as Thatcherism.

The woman who was to become one of the most influential politicians of the 20th century had famously modest origins. She was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13 1925 in the small town of Grantham, Lincolnshire. Her father was a grocer and Methodist lay preacher who was actively involved in local politics.

The young Margaret became president of the university's student Conservative Association. After graduating, she worked as a research chemist, but continued to pursue her interest in politics.

Thatcher couldn't win over enough voters
in her first election

She was selected as Conservative candidate in a safe Labour constituency, and stood unsuccessfully in the elections of both 1950 and 1951. In 1951 she also married Denis Thatcher, a divorcee and a successful businessman, and started to study law, qualifying as a barrister in 1953 and specializing in taxation. Her twins, Carol and Mark, were born the same year.

'Milk snatcher'

She was finally elected to parliament as member for Finchley in North London in 1959, becoming a junior minister, and when the Conservatives went into opposition in 1964 she became their spokeswoman on Housing and Land, promoting the right of council tenants to buy their own homes, a policy she successfully implemented when she eventually came to power. An estimated 2 million council tenants became home owners, at the cost of sharply reducing the stock of social housing.

When the Conservatives came back to power in 1970, Thatcher was promoted to Education Secretary. Told to make cuts in her department, she stopped free school milk for primary school children, winning herself the famous headline: "Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher."

 Thatcher had plenty of reason to
celebrate political victories

The 1973 oil crisis and two miners' strikes brought down the government of Edward Heath and Thatcher stood successfully against her former ally for the leadership of the party, becoming the first woman to lead a major British political party. In 1979, she became the UK's first female prime minister when she won the election against a Labour government which, like the Heath government before it, had failed to solve the problem of industrial unrest.

Tough policies

Thatcherism, as her policies came to be known, was characterized by an emphasis on low inflation, privatization, a free market economy, control of the money supply, and controls on the power of the labor movement. The policy was to have a profound and lasting effect on British society.

Thatcher was fascinated by Reagan - she
 even kept his doodles from a G7 summit

Not all Conservatives agreed with Thatcher's tough line, but they were dismissed as "wets." At the 1980 party conference she warned against a change of policy: "You turn if you want to - the lady's not for turning," she said.

Thatcher was said to have liked her nickname "The Iron Lady", bestowed upon her by a Soviet newspaper in 1976 after she criticized the Soviet Union. She was a staunch ally and friend of her American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, throughout the Cold War, allowing the United States to deploy nuclear missiles in Britain and tripling the UK's nuclear forces with US Trident nuclear-armed submarines.

Winning in the Falklands, and at home

On 2 April 1982 the military junta in Argentina invaded the British Falkland Islands, claiming that they belonged to Argentina. She dispatched a naval task force and two months later Argentina surrendered. The victory ensured Thatcher's re-election in a Conservative landslide the following year.

In her second term, Thatcher continued to implement her monetary policies, including stepping up the privatization of state industries. Millions of ordinary people were encouraged to buy shares in industries such as British Telecom, British Gas, Rolls-Royce and British Airways as they were sold off.

Thatcher's hard-line approach also extended to the conflict in Northern Ireland. On 12 October 1984 the IRA bombed a Brighton hotel where she was staying for a party conference. Five people were killed, but Thatcher escaped unharmed, and delivered her speech as planned. The following year Thatcher and the Irish premier Garret FitzGerald signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving the Republic of Ireland an advisory role in the governance of Northern Ireland for the first time.

Opposed to German reunification

Thatcher did not support Helmut Kohl's
wish to reunify Germany.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, Thatcher found an unlikely ally in the Communist leader: "We can do business together," she said. She was, however, initially opposed to German reunification, telling Gorbachev two months before the fall of the Wall that it "would lead to a change in post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security."

Thatcher's "Iron Lady" stance was eventually to prove her downfall. Ever skeptical where Brussels was concerned, in 1990 she gave a speech stoutly rejecting any increase in the power of what was then the European Community. The speech outraged many of her colleagues, and moved two prominent Conservative ministers to rise up against her. She was advised that, if she tried to defend her position, she would lose. The defeat was a bitter blow: "It was treachery with a smile on its face," she said later.

British prime minister David Cameron
emphasizes his debt to Thatcher

Thatcher announced her resignation, and was succeeded by John Major, who went on to win the next election in 1992. She stood down as an MP that year and was made a life peer, becoming Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Over the following years she continued to attend debates in the House of Lords, wrote two volumes of memoirs, campaigned against the Maastricht Treaty, and condemned ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces during the war in Bosnia. In 1998 she stood by the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, speaking of the "debt" the UK owed to him over help given during the Falklands War.

In 2002 Thatcher suffered several small strokes and was advised not to engage in public speaking. She also began to suffer from dementia. She did, however, occasionally appear in public, notably for the unveiling of a bronze statue of herself in the House of Commons in 2007. "I might have preferred iron," Thatcher said, "but bronze will do. It won't rust."